This thread is going to be the storehouse for people looking for Hunter-specific help with talents, gear, pets, and strategy. This is done so that the current Theorycrafting threads aren't bloated by this kind of stuff.

Anyone is free to post their logs, armories, or experiences and ask for help with whatever is bothering you. Hopefully the more knowledgeable members of the Hunter community will chip is with advice, and links to threads where things (like the Shot Rotation) have already been explained. Don't be excessively stupid, and you should get helpful advice.

Please read the thread at least casually before posting, since no one enjoys answering the same question 5 times. I'm sure the Banhammer will make it's presence felt if things get out of hand.

Cheeky, good post, I'll post a first question

Why is it that on Dr. Boom testing, I get more dps out of using a castsequence macro then when I manually time shots? Am I just a bad shot timer or is it something else? Or is your spreadsheet just that awesomeness

I'd take a look at a combat log and see if you are clipping/clobbering auto shots by your hand-timed steady casts. Comparing it to a macroed log would problem let you refine your timing a bit. Someone posted a little java (or something) tool to check times between auto shots. That should provide very useful.

By the way, I ain't volunteering to answer everyone's questions. I was just providing a thread for it. (That being said, I'll help out when I can, but I am not the world's greatest Hunter.)

I've been looking around in the forums and i can't seem to find a direct pet comparison. This doesn't have to be necessarily limited to a specific spec, but i would prefer it be directed towards BM. I've been wondering what pet would put out the highest dps and by what margin, i've been using a cat for some time now, and wondering if i should switch to a scorpid.

I was wondering if there is such a thing as "too much crit" for a bm hunter.

I'm in pre-25 man gear (karazhan, heroics etc) and have 1675 ap (with AotH, and 1520 without) as well as 25.46% crit chance when I have my "raiding gear" on. I would adjust it by taking out crit/agi gems and replacing with 16 ap if I do indeed have too much crit.

Cat and Ravager are almost identical - the Ravager is 2-3 DPS ahead, at max. Wind Serpents are slightly below them, mostly due to the AI/pathing issues with Lightning Breath. Scorpid, on a poison-vulnerable boss will completely dominate any other pet, to the tune of 100-200 DPS.

There is never too much crit. RAP is the easiest thing to buff in raids (food, pots, flasks, Blessing of Might, TSA, etc.) Using a spreadsheet might show you if there is a slight benefit to re-socketing some gems to +AP, but I'm betting the gains won't justify the gem costs.

If you are making geming decisions, go with Agi. Best gains for the budget of a single gem will be agility unless your hit gear is really really lacking.

If your ping is sub 100ms, it has been my experience, a macro will beat a human timing. You can simply mash a macro so many times a second to make up for bad reaction times or lag jitter.

I'd like to qualify this by saying that the wind serpent pathing issues can be circumvented by taking lightning breath off of autocast and macroing to your specials to "manually" trigger it. If you do this, and spec to provide adequate focus to your pet, wind serpents will do slightly more damage than a cat or ravager on most mobs due to the fact that LB ignores armor.

It's my understanding that as long as your latency is less than the "dead time" in your rotation, there should be no difference between the two except that a macro doesn't allow for human error. Basically, if your latency is causing you to clip shots when you hit your button as close as possible to 0 seconds on your auto shot timer, then pre-loading your steadies manually will benefit you. On the other hand, if you have some space after your steadies and before your autos, using a macro (which starts the steady at 0 seconds) will be identical to manually threading. My macro works smoothly with my typical ping of 200-300 and a 3.0 speed bow.

I have a castsequence macro hotkeyed and steady bound to mousewheel, I use the macro when in not under any haste but when I get haste procs I find that the macro doesn't preform as well as manually threading. Also the macro seems to have some problems with rapid target switching(Lady Vashj p2), sometimes it wont cast the steady shot until an autoshot fires. Best advice is test them both and find the one that works for you.

Spending hard earned gold on swapping 1%crit for an extra 40AP would gain you nothing. Your DPS would almost certainly not budge an inch.

8 agil and 16 AP, for all intensive purposes, are almost identical in terms of DPS output. Even with Kings, they are pretty much exactly the same.

Hey

Since it's hunters help thread I can write my first elitejerk post here so welcome
To start with I've read most of BM hunter raiding thread, and may other infos here, I have to live with 250-350 latency (I play on US realms from Europe)

my armory profile
and log from our first Gruul kill (we're very casual guild due to this Euro on US servers issue)

My basic question is, what else in my gear I need to improve? What skills I'm overusing, using too little?
I know some of my gems need to be changed but I used the one I had from heroics to make my MM -> BM transfer less painful
I still need some Kara loot to improve my hitrating and get rid of that ancient scope but is there a blue gear I've skipped, etc.

Thanks in advance for any comments

Oh man if someone could provide that, it would be an immense help Any takers?

If you're putting out 350k on Gruul, you don't have a great deal to worry about. Your personal dps looks nice. You hit a streak of very bad luck with your steady shot critrate, nothing you can do about that.

I do notice that your pet died twice though, by cavein. You may want to consider taking two points out of endurance, sticking them in Improved Mend Pet, and use it more liberally. Especially if you don't have Seal of Light or Improved Leader of the Pack to help you. If your pet gets caught in cavein, pull it out.

That was my 5th try on Gruul with this build, now I have pet attack and pet return bind to my mouse so I call it back faster, but that's something one have to learn and practice. Other thing I still can't get used to is shorter range and fixing KC between shots.
I was a bit worried about so slow weapon but I guess it suits my latency and manual timings better than something faster, and I can pass Prince bow to someone with greater need, provided it'll ever drop

and a side note, my performance as a hunter after like two weeks of reading this forum, trying things, and doing test has improved big way! you guys here are doing exelent for what you have my thanks

Question: As a BM Hunter, how would the Dragonspine Trophy effect my dps? A link to a thread that discusses this in depth would be extremely appreciated.

There is some good info on this in other places.

Petopia is a good explination of pets in general:
Petopia: A visual guide to hunter pets in the World of Warcraft!
But you probably know all that!

However - the BRK Column on WoW insider did a really good theorycraft session on the "whole scorpid thing" here:
BigRedKitty: The Whole Scorpid Thing - WOW Insider

Including a really explanation good of why to Trinket your heart out before sending Mr Snippy to attack.


However for me i think this is clearly a bug, and i'm expecting a hot fix any time now - so i'm not going to bother getting 6 levels of happiness on a Scorpid for him to be nerfed!

I've got Kill Command attached to Arcane Shot in a macro. Both have similar cooldowns, I find its the least disruptive way to integrate it into my rotation. I only ever touch it when both are primed. For mana efficiency its a big drain, but it sure shows pretty numbers when I use it. I don't have the mana to spam it every time it's alive, but I squeeze it in whenever I feel I can.

Disclaimer: This may not be great advice.

That's what I'm going to aim at.
Another question, what do do when shammy pop bloodlust? I usualy press rapidfire and if quickshots proc I just sit and watch the show, hitting KC/Arcane but mostly at random because I can hardly see my castbar and it's with 3.0 weapon, I can hardly imagine what would it be with faster one..

I was wondering about the effective use of the Don Santos Hunting Rifle. I was recently trolling the official hunter forums when I came by this guy who posted a WWS of Morogrim where he achieved 1477 DPS with an optimal group makeup and using the Don Santos Rifle. What surprised me the most was that he was still using 5 pieces of Naxx gear and a DFT. The rifle he was using proc'd 15 times over 8:36. To give some comparison, quick shots proc'd 13 times. So doing some math, the buff was up at most 34.4% of the time (can't see if it proc'd while the buff was already active, though).

So my main question is, does anyone have any thorough testing done on this weapon and can give a reasonable PPM rate? If the buff is active ~33% of the time, thats about 83 RAP over the entire fight. Would it be worth using this gun over a higher DPS weapon?

And here's the log I found: Tobiah - WWS

Ignore his gun and how much it procs. The single most important factor in him achieving this level of DPS on this encounter, is his pet management. Somehow he has managed to get his Scorpid to put out 617DPS over the entire fight. With that level of damage from his pet he could stand there and just autoshoot for the entire fight, and still break 1k.

I did some analysis here on it. Didn't get a whole lot of feedback, so it's just one Troll's word. It's modeled in the spreadsheet, so you can always check for yourself.

I've found The Don to have a 1.7 ppm rate, and I've seen it proc off of both auto and specials. It's an amazing weapon, I use it in any low-mobility fight. It has (as far as I can tell) no cooldown either, so you get chain procs fairly often. If you can stand still and unload for large periods of time, it's probably the best ranged weapon in the game for a BM Hunter.

The Don has a great synergy with Scorpids. Since you'll most likely get a proc in about 13 seconds it's worth waiting for the Santos' Blessing buff and then starting a Poison stack.

Here's a WWS from our first Morogrim kill Mikari - WWS

I know I clobbered way too many auto shots and it will be something I'll fix for next time, low fps during AOE phases and crappy latency didn't help.

Does anyone have any idea roughly how much DPS I lost due to my rotation and any suggestions regarding my gear/spec?

Here's also a Lurker Below parse Mikari - WWS adding this because I think the DPS seems low considering my gear, there's a Gruul Parse in there too if anyone has any suggestions regarding that.

Thanks.

Since we've got this thread going, I'll dive right in!

Ranged Weapon - I've been trying to figure out what ranged weapon to go for next. I'm using the Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle right now and I love it! Last night, after about the 35th killing of Prince in Kara, he dropped the Sunfury - and when I plugged it into the spreadsheet, it showed a ~20dps DROP! Does that one/tenth of a second really make that much difference? I was floored.

Helm - I am still stuck in the Helm of Desolation. I would love T4 Helm, but as noted above, Prince really doesn't have much fondness for me and I am at wits end with running Kara. Outside of T5 (we've not downed Leo or Vashj yet) what would be a good upgrade for me? Using the spreadsheet, ... it doesn't look like much.

Shot Rotation - I used to time my shots by sound, but lately I'd seen my numbers dip so I grabbed quartz and started using that. Sure, I can NAIL the stupid rotation... when I stare with my eyes glued on the freaking cast bar. Doing better dps is awesome and stuff, but I'd love to see what the encounters actually look like, ya know. (Some exagerration here) What can be done to free up my having to stare at racing cast bars? Any mods or tips out there?

Kill Command - I don't use macros (but am willing to try some) so I am curious how best to fit in KC when I have the opportunity. When I use it after a steady it lags up the auto and gets me all flustered. (I really am starting to blame these bars.... they control me!)

Scorpid Poison - Do you always wait for a Hourglass Proc to get things going? I don't see mine proc as much as I want it to, so normally just pop Brooch, Bloodfury, Bestial Wrath, and Scorpid Poison Rank 4. Sadly that only nets me poison ticks in the 550-650 range. Is that about the norm?

Ok that's it for now.

Bloodlust reduces the Global Cooldown proportionately, so continuing auto/steady spam is your best bet assuming you can adjust to the speed well enough.

Looking at your armory, you have a TON of +hit. I usually like to stay around 95+ in my hit rating. I rarely miss (maybe once every 2 raids, if that). I would throw a +28 crit scope on that crossbow, and replace the hit/agi gem with an 8 agility gem. Great dps in Gruuls though

Ok, since this is here, I'll make my second EJ post. First off the logs,

Totals:
WWS
Breakdown:
netigen.com: page error

vs

Loading... (Void Reaver Kill)

The Armory


In Howitzer's log above, he does quite a bit more dps than I do, but when I look at the specific shot stats, I am hitting within a 1-5 dmg points of him the entire time, yet, he has 971 dps, and I have 689 dps. I use a short shot macro of /castsequence reset=3 Steady Shot, Auto Shot then I put specials in there when ever they are up (manually). I'm using a windserpent, but that's cause another hunter is using a Scorpid, and the stings do not stack.

My lat is 100-160 and fps is 16ish on boss fights and 4-5 on SSC/TK Trash.

I need a few gems changed, and I'm waiting for the patch to swap +24AP for the +15 agi on my gloves. I cant ever seem to get the chess boots to drop, which would take care of my hit issue (though its seems bigger than normal this fight), even after 6 months of raiding, but the ones I have on now are 95% comparable. Boots of the Endless Hunt. I also need Girdle of Blasted Reaches from Heroic Ramps. I'm using max pots during this log, i.e. warp burgers the entire time, Major AGI pots, and Draniec wisdom, in addition to LotP for the trash, though I was out of range of it for 95% of the VR kill. Also GoA during trash, but it was on only for part of the VR fight.

How can I get higher dps on this? Using Cheeky's spreadsheet I should have near 1k unbuffed, even in my crappy gear. Fully buffed with Rage of Unraveller popped I was at 2550 ap, 1019 agi, and I want to say 43% crit.

How can I improve in a non gear related way as a SV hunter?

Edit: hell, even in a gear related way...if there is something I missed please tell me.
2nd Edit: I know its a bit off of Howitzers numbers here because its a different boss with a different armour value, which I just now realized. But for theory sake, lets say its the same, because I do not have access to any of his logs on VR while he was SV.

Been looking around and haven't found an answer, why is scorpid poison rank 4 preferred for poison stacking over rank 5?

Becuase it last 10 seconds, providing 2 opportunities to refresh it. The base damage difference is pretty negligable between the two.

It does the damage over a longer period of time(10s vs 8s) - so the stack stays up longer - thus allowing you 2 shots to refresh it instead of 1.

The Autoshot DPS scales based on weapon speed, but Steady Shot doesn't. While the [Sunfury Bow of the Phoenix] will have slightly higher damaging Steady Shots than the [Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle] the gun is shooting them 0.2/2.9 = 6.9% faster. That turns out to be a huge difference.

I did a calculation once that showed for a BM Hunter any RAP value over -300 (that is negative) equates to the rifle being a better DPS weapon than the bow in a Auto/Steady rotation.

God i love Blizzard and the way they set things up. For the longest time the xbow from BWL was the best weapon in the game becasue it was the slowest, now they have all the SCC + weapons in the 3.0 range but they will not out dps a 2.7 weapon. When will someone at Blizz understand the true mechanics of the hunter class.

I would in no way, shape, or form recommend that anyone reduce their hit rating below 136 (89 with sure footed). It is the cheapest and most effective item budget for improving DPS, short of Haste which we do not find in any quantity until T6. There is absolutely no reason to tell someone they need to reduce their Hit Rating in order to improve their DPS. In fact there is every reason in the world not to. If you have between 100 and 136 and would gimp yourself by trying to stack +hit, fine, stay where you are until you find some nice upgrades, but again, asking someone to cut their hit rating to stack other stats is just going to reduce their damage for no good reason.

1) Howitzer is not survival. He will naturally do at least 200 DPS more than you at the same gear level, and he is way further along in progression and gear than you are.

2) Compare apples to apples. Hydross and Void Reaver will naturally have different DPS amounts, plus void reaver is very dependant on how lucky you get with the arcane balls for personal DPS as a ranged class. Void reaver is a bad fight for hunters.

3) In cheeky's sheet you aren't taking in to account the armor to the boss, which usually reduces damage by somewhere around 20-30%. It is also theoretical damage, so I prefer looking at the damage increases as ratios as opposed to actual damage I will be seeing in game.

You seem to have a pretty decent ratio of specials to auto, but another 15 steady shots and a few more multi shots would put you up another 10,000+ damage. I would compare your personal DPS to the DPS of your BM/MM hunters. You did more over-all damage than the BM, and only around 50-100 lower actual DPS. I'd say that's pretty good. I've only been at the top of the Void Reaver DPS meter once, and that was because we happened to only have 1 melee when we usually have at least 5-6.

What does your shot rotation look like? Normally you want to go for something with 2 specials every other shot like this:
Auto
Steady
Multi
Auto
Steady
Auto
Steady
Arcane
Auto
etc...

And finally gear:
Ignore those set bonuses. They are worthless. You gain 4 stamina by dumping 4 agility - why? Sure, stamina can be nice for taking hits, but honestly as survival you will likely have well over 10k HP with raid buffs. The stamina does nothing for you in a raid environment, the agility on the other hand does a lot for you. Same goes for that chest piece - dump that set bonuses and fill every slot with agility. Honestly, 2 MP5 is not worth losing 16 agility.

You would probably do better to pick up the Felstalker Breast plate from your local Leatherworker. It has good agility, 3 sockets for more agility, and lots of AP. Though it doesnt look like a very large upgrade, so if you just saved your money and instead socketed agility you'd be pretty well set.

Kaber TY for the review.


edit: Howitzer was SV for that fight, but regardless, I need to compare apples to apples, because as you said, VR does not = Hydross

Question.
What are the exact benefits of a +5bow skill (Troll racial passive) against a ??boss lets say for example Gruuls.
Since the max hit rating one should aim for is 137, what would it lower to if i have +5bow skill?
Also if it does more damage, if so, how much etc.

+1 skill is around 0.1% hit if I recall correctly. 15.7 Hit rating is 1%, so, that's about 1.6 HR you can lose per +skill.


And Rakan, Howitzer is in Black Temple with Tier 6. If he didnt out DPS you by that much I would have actually been amazed. I know the log you posted is from may/june, but 3 months ago I would expect him to have been in Tier 5 at the very least. You are barely in T4 right now.

Agree, but at this point my latency cut in, ofcourse I understand that it's ok to delay few shots a bit if you still manage to get more shots and that's what I'll try next time.

This bring another question, is there a rate of fire where you'd benefit more from +12dmg scope than from +28critrating one? Provided of course hit is capped.

That was my actual intention, I could with a little help of friends get mats for +30hitratig scope in less than 2h and 20g, that's a lot of hit but it's cheap and it don't force me to use too many items I don't like. Yes I plan to change the scope but I need some love from either Att/Aran/Illhof/Prince to get few better +hit items.
Even simple calulation show that one more crited shot is just wasted if you miss other one

You're already at 140 Hit rating, which is slightly above the cap. Are you saying you want the 30 hit scope to bring yourself to 170, or that you want to lose some of your current hit gear to allow for it? If you actually need the hit rating (which you don't), the 30 HR scope is the best scope you can get. Otherwise, the 28 crit scope is the best out there.

I read this question and was like...hmmm, I am going to go look that up.

According to WoWwiki, it mentions something about if a mobs defense skill is >10 your weapon skill, each point reduces your chance to hit by .2% So on a boss mob which has a defense rating of 365 compared to a rating of 350...you would have a 3% chance to miss due to skill differences.

According to WoWwiki, if you got 5 weapon skill it would take the difference between your attack and his defense to 10 making each point worth .1%. So effectively, +5 weapon skill would grant you 2% tohit for the first 5 points.

Not sure how true it is, if someone knows the truth maybe they could update WoWwiki ;-)



Also, for criticals, it goes off on some tanget about a cap on criticals...I always though a critical was higher ranked then a miss so if you ever got to the point where a crit and miss were fighting over the same spot, the crit would win...anyone else know?

Hi,
This is my first time posting here but I saw this thread pop up just as I was about to post my question on one of the other threads.

I was wondering about the 0.5 second cast time to auto-shot and whether this starts counting when the timer starts or when you finish casting your steady shot?

This is because I've seen that the Don Santos rifle is supposed to be better than Sunfury with a BM spec but my BM spec and Sunfury give me a 2.1 attack speed which when you take away the steady shot gives me 0.6 seconds left. Does the auto shot cast take up these 0.6 seconds because then that would only give 0.1 left for lag/human error.

My haste calculations might be wrong but with the 2.7 rifle you have a speed of :

2.7 / 1.15 / 1.2 = 1.95

When you take away the 1.5 steady shot you're left with 0.45 seconds which seems to me would delay your auto shot if its cast time was starting at this point (even more with a kill command?).

So my main question is:

Does the auto-shot cast time take up these time windows left after a steady shot or does it start as soon as you start to cast steady shot as long as you remain standing still?

Thank you, these forums are amazing!

Naela

Posted this orginally in one of the hunter threads in public discussion but moved it here.

Just a quick question for any other non-us based players in regards to latency. (slightly OT but theres been a bit off talk about it so thought i'd check in here) How much do you find it affects shot rotations? I've recently started playing WoW again quitting before TBC come out and I'm currently specced survival. I like the utility of survival (for EW and traps for outside of raiding) but as other posters have said, macro's are almost completely unusable with an average 500 ping. And I can't seem to reliably fit in one steady + special. Do most non-us players just bite the bullet and spec BM? Or do I just need to practise my rotations more?

I realise this isn't a personal advice thread but I feel it's relevant at least for those of us who have to deal with high latency. Is it advisable to be specced anything besides BM with a ping of 400+ or is it simply a matter of adjusting to the high latency?

We don't actually know and there really is no reasonable way to find out unless someone could somehow reach 100% crit and fire a statistically significant number of shots with 0 hit rating to show no misses.

However, the general consensus is that we are on a 1-roll system where a crit can not miss. A way to think of it is you have a 100-sided dice. You have 25% crit, 5% miss. We could say a roll of 1-25 means you crit, a roll of 26-95 a hit, and a roll of 96-100 a miss. That's under a 1-roll system. If we are under a two roll system then things change and a miss can't be a crit (meaning with 100% crit you would still miss 5% of the time in our example).

Sorry if you misunderstood me, I have this scope already, my goal was fist to cap hitrating (and it's done), then to change some items (like scope) as I get more and better items with +hitrating. For example, if Att would be so kind and drop his neck for me, I'd switch cloak I'm using to the one for heroic badges or crafted, they don't have hit on them so I'd keep my ~130-140 hit

Steady Shot cast time is affected by all relevant hastes.

The cast time on Steady Shot is affected by hastes giving it a 1.09s casting time. The global cooldown keeps you at 1.5s between steady shots, but that gives you about .8s to account for latency, human error, and the .5s auto shot timer.

Ah, thanks guys! I knew steady shot cast time was affected by haste but completely forgot to include it in my mini calculations.

Cheers

Repost of my parser, it was buried in the BM thread.

Edit: This will only work with standard log strings and a US client. The source is included however so if you know a bit of Java you should be able to alter it for your language.

Edit to answer a question:

Scope damage does not get added to steady shot.

The 0.5 second cast time starts as soon as the weapon-speed cooldown finishes as long as no other cast is in progress. The kicker is that unlike normal casts like steady shot the auto-shot cast can be interrupted (with normal casts you receive an error message about not being able to do two things at once). In practice this means that if you have say a 2.5-second auto-shot speed and you start your steady shot immediately after an auto-shot there will be a .5 second dead spot before the .5 second auto-shot cast begins. This also means that if you cast say arcane shot in the middle of the .5 second auto-shot cast the auto-shot cast will have to start over.

Wow Web Stats

LB dmg from windserpent...average hit is 154-159.

While I realize that Wind Serpents got the Nerf bat like all hell, I just have to check this.


According to the above, the WWS for my pets LB attack, average hit is 154-159. he's lvl 70, full loyalty, and trained. Now my RAP is 1980 unbuffed, and 25 man buffed for these fights it was about 2300-2400. So, by this calculation below

LB_Damage = [ ( 99 + 113 ) /2 ] + ( (RAP=1980)) * 0.125 * 0.4286 ) = 212.0785

LB_Damage = [ ( 99 + 113 ) /2 ] + ( (RAP=2300) * 0.125 * 0.4286 ) = 229.2225

he should be hitting for the above numbers on average, regardless of resists or mitigation, and my max as you have seen, is not even on par with those numbers. Is my calculation wrong still or am I just missing something?

Edit: or is there a better pet than a WS for a raid situation other than a scropid for a SV hunter, since I'm getting the BM hunter to take the scorpid for more overall dmg.

edited. responded to someone who already replied

I don't think anyone has a good handle on the RAP->LB valuations anymore. Using your numbers it looks like you get 2.3% of your RAP added to the damage. That would mean the spell coefficient for LB is .1843. Since [(99 + 113) / 2] + (2300 * 0.125 * .1843) = 159.

If we could get a few more tests with different RAP values (from naked to raid buffed in 100 RAP increments would be perfect) we might be able to finally nail it down. As it is, your numbers are about double what I see for average Claw hits on Void Reaver, so barring resists/crits/misses it looks like it is the same damage per focus.

This explanation is, I feel, slightly misleading.

The 2-roll theory suggests that miss/hit is determined on one roll, then hit/crit on another.
The only way to tell with 100% accuracy whether or not Hunter attacks use a 1- or 2-roll system is by having a Chance to Crit higher than your Chance to Hit, but lower than 100%.
This can be the case if afflicted by debuffs causing your Chance to Hit to drop, while at the same time having a high Chance to Crit. If, with this setup, you hit, it's proof of a 2-roll system.


1-roll theory, 25% Crit, 5% Miss:
5% of attacks miss, 25% of attacks crit, 70% of attacks hit

1-roll theory, 100% Crit, 5% Miss:
5% of attacks miss, 95% of attacks crit


2-roll theory, 25% Crit, 5% Miss:
5% of attacks miss, 23.75% of attacks crit, 71.25% of attacks hit

2-roll theory, 100% Crit, 5% Miss:
5% of attacks miss, 95% of attacks crit

I was under the impression that the spell coefficient for instant cast spells was .4286, as that was what was added or 'fixed' for the nerf, iirc. Just for others that may not know

[(99+113)/2] equals average range of normal LB dmg...

.125 equals amount of RAP applyed to spell dmg for pets.

.4286 equals how much spell dmg an instant cast spell recieves.

I will see if i can get some naked tests done after my server comes up tomorrow sometime, and see what it comes out to.

Do you mean, "If, with this setup, you hit, it's proof of a 2-roll system."?

I might be using the wrong terminology, but there is a factor all castser's have that multiplies their +damage for each specific spell. Usually, it is a value based on the casting time of the spell, but sometimes it is different (such as Improved Fireball for Mages). I figured LB just went from the default .4286 to something custom that minimizes the impact of RAP.

Also, we were forgetting to count Happiness (+25% damage), Unleashed Fury (+20% damage), Ferocious Inspiration (+3% damage), potential Orc racials, etc. in the equations. I'm beginning to think +damage on LB may have been nerfed to almost 0.

I still have a windserpent in the stables. Sounds like a good opportunity to test this out.

Edit: Great, I create a thread to move the non-TheoryCrafting posts out of the other Hunter threads, and I start TheoryCrafting here....

I have no idea what you're talking about and I most certainly did not just edit my post.
=)

Also, regarding Lightning Breath: The spell damage --> damage ratio was changed from ~43% to something closer to.. 2% or something like that.

Hi there. Thanks for making this thread. I always felt my questions were too minor for the big hunter threads.

I wondered if someone would comment on micro-managing his/her pet's positioning (BM spec). After reading about (and seeing on WWS) issues with pets getting parried, does anyone have tips on getting their pet positioned behind the boss if the tank doesn't have him turned from the raid? Does anyone do this or am I just worrying excessively?

Also, I am definitely having trouble with auto-shot clipping when I have two haste procs going at once (from Rapid Fire, IAotH, or Abacus). I understand steady shot should have a decreased casting time, but I'm just not getting it and lately have started to just auto-shot at these times. I guess I would add that I don't "feel" the faster cast time for steady shot. My latency tends to run between 60 and 160 ms. What do others do?

Edit: to add one more question
Scorpid Sting. Do you keep this up on all bosses, some bosses, trash, or nobody? I see someone just posted in the debuff priority thread that hunters should never have Scorpid up. I thought it was a valuable debuff now, and I've been putting it up on everything. Advice, please.

Ahh, so crit can't gobble up the miss chance in a 1-roll system, ok. That was really the only thing I wasn't positive about (and I obviously went with the wrong assumption there :P ).

I think the misses can only be helped with Animal Handler, and maxing it out, as far as parry goes, you could park your pet in the place before hand and then send it in, but that can lead to issues, also eyes of the beast it to a place, but again, you loose dps time with that.

As far as the clipping, I dont know much on that topic, so i'll leave it to others.

Scorpid Sting is from what I can tell and have read, a very large boost to a tanks avoidance, and should be kept up at all times, especially on hard hitting/fast hitting bosses, as it can equate to a lot of dmg avoided.

Rakan,

I have used both Wind Serpent and a Ravager as SV spec. You would think the WS could make use of the extra focus from all the crits but I have never noticed more than a 5 DPS difference between the two in WWS.

The Shot Roatation I use is Auto -> Steady -> Arcane -> Auto -> Steady ->Kill Command -> Auto -> Steady -> Multi -> Auto -> Steady -> Kill Command . . .

When my DST procs I use only steadies and kill command.

If arcane is avaialbe use it in place of the 2nd multi, my bow speed doesn't allow for the CD to run out in time. Arcane hits for about the same as my multi shot with curse of shadows up.

Like otehr peopel said ignore set bonuses on your gems and try not to use anything that doesn't have some AGI on it. I have found that 1 Agi = 3 AP = 1.8 CR to be in the ball park when making gear decisions.

The best thing you can do is get a fast weapon and try to get a dragonspien trophy. As a general rule, the more time you spend in a 1:1 roatation at or near 1.7-1.8 Attack speed, the more DPS you are going to put out.

Here is a link to my Guild's WWS. I am pretty sure I am SV in all these runs. Wow Web Stats

I feel that MT is the way to go. Sure its only 3.5% crit or so but that crit makes your EW and TotH that much more potent. The haste from hawk usualy puts you out of a 1:1.5 roatation and isn't fast enough to get a DPS increase by dropping to a 1:1.

It so happens I have a good handle on RAP->LB valuations!

All they did for the nerf was to change LBs spell damage coefficient to 0.1, down from sharing the same one all instants do.

Edit: This means 1.25% of your RAP directly translates into LB damage.

Edit 2:
WWS against a boss is not a good place to try to figure this stuff out. Your average hit will include a large number of partial resists as every boss has 24 base resistances to every school that you cannot get rid of. When I tested this out a long time ago I took my wind serpent out in front of Org and zapped critters till I got a reasonable maximum with no gear on and then again with more AP.

what about for a surv spec?, i picked up both the gun and the bow recently myself

dwarf hunter tho mind you so gun specialisation would probably come into it

I was wondering if many hunters are using Kill Command much in their rotations now. When Bliz first removed the GCD, I incorporated it into a macro since I usually had a bit of spare time between my shots to get one off (BM spec with Sunfury bow). I then switched metas to the Thundering Skyfire Diamond, and always spec IAotH. Now I usually have passive haste effects going and have to leave out KC's and focus on just holding a good 1:1 rotation without clipping.

I can definitely see why many are starting to head back to MM as a raiding spec from 41-20-0 once getting the DST. I would never be able to use KC as BM and would probably clip tons of shots with 3 passive haste effects like this.


So does anyone use KC anymore with this meta gem and IAotH? Anyone with both and DST using KC in raids?

You mention the [Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle] as being higher dps for BM than [Sunfury Bow of the Phoenix]. Wouldn't [Barrel-Blade Longrifle] from Doomwalker be even better?


Also, in your spreadsheet, do you have plans to adjust for trolls using bows and dwarves using guns? Specifcally, I'm wondering about the +hit difference. Your spreadsheet puts me at 97.8% hit chance. I'm a troll using a bow with 97 (6.15%) hit rating (no surefooted). I've never missed in weeks of raiding according to sw stats. Theres more hunter testing on tkasomething. Prety much the concensus is trolls and dwarves only need 6% hit using thier respective racial weapons to never miss in a raid (mobs 3 lvls higher)


And lastly, I've read that physical pet specials (claw, bite, gore, screech, etc...) do not scale at all with attack power. I haven't tested this, has anyone ?

It's going to depend heavily upon your shot rotation. The math isn't complicated, if you don't like using spreadsheets you can probably figure it out yourself.

I know Olgas is doing a lot of work on this issue. I don't think there are really good results yet. I am following the situation, as my own testing as a Troll with a bow was inconclusive. As soon as the exact mechanics are figured out I'll update the spreadsheet. For now you can hand adjust in extra hit rating based on what you feel is correct.

There is nothing in the damage calculations for Claw/Bite/Gore to have a pet AP/spell damage component. They won't scale because there is no part of the equation that can change (besides crit rate).

My question (the first of many I feel). Great idea for a thread btw.

Really noob'y non-technical or theory based question coming up...

We had our first Lurker kill last night. Shortly into the first phase 1 there was a knockback and a split second where my Scorpid was the only melee in combat. It quickly got insta-gibbed by the Krakken. I cursed a bit on Ven then proceeded to pewpew my ass off. Phase 2 came, we cleared the mobs with about 15 seconds to spare. I ressed my Scorpid, mended, FD and drank up to full mana and he popped back up. Easy. And the rest of the fight went fine. Scoprion and I lived till the end and we did about 500k damage together. I had a few pathing problems while DPSing in the water, but that's neither here nor there. I'm sure I can find a better place to jump in.

My question is, when I ressed my pet I had to settle for it being content(and devoid of all buffs). So missed it's dps for most of phase 1, then only had it at 100% for the rest of the fight. I don't FD/Drink much. Almost never. Was it possible for me to have fed it? In my limited experiance of trying to FD and drink, you usually enter combat very quickly after right clicking the drink icon.

Is it possible to FD-Drink, Eat, feed? Perhaps there is a cute little macro that makes this a lot easier. OR maybe 100% will have to do for those occations where you're unlucky enough to lose the pet that early.

@Carlaena

To answer your question, yes it is possible to FD, drink, Feed your pet like that. The issue is that on each boss now there are 'combat pulses' that put you back in combat, thus making it hard to time it correctly to FD/Feed pet. (mainly so you cant use items like jumper cables and such).

In that instance, if you can get it done fast enough, you can FD/feed your pet and get them back to happy, but the second your pet is in actual combat (i.e. hitting things) the feed pet buff goes off of them, and they stop gaining happiness. So you have to wait to send them in until they have reached the desired happiness.



Edit: also, in relation to my gem selections - I didnt put those gems in each one for the set bonus. I put them in for the meta gem bonus, which is 2 reds, 2 yellows, and 2 blues. I just put them in places where I could take advantage of some free stat points. For a SV hunter and the amount that I crit, that 3% (which is doubled like the slaying talents) adds up to a ton of damage. So I took the loss on the extra agility.

Also, TY for the advice Jander.

If your pet is on passive and you FD you can feed him. Just drop the food from your bag onto him before you get up (at least, that is what I do.)

I still think your original question is very much valid. Too right, that VR does not equal Hydross, but it shouldn't matter, because gear difference and 'armor of boss' difference will be accounted for in your average shot damage, which oddly seems similar.

Even more of a mystery, you can omit time available to do damage from the argument, because you are not comparing damage done, but DPS. Damage per second.

If there is something I am missing here please enlighten me! It is quite a mystery.

I'd also like to ask a question myself regarding scorpids.

I have the 41/20/0 spec, including 2/2 Go for the Throat and 2/2 Bestial Discipline.

My scorpid has rank 4 poison, and i was wondering whether or not, i can afford to let claw go off too. My crit rate is hovering around 30% raid buffed. (also have animal handler - does this also affect spells like scorpid poison and LB?)

We usually run with 2-3 hunters for our 25 man groups, and they're consistantly in or near the top DPS slots. What I've noticed though, is their spec/shot rotations/pets don't appear to be the same and in some cases remotely near what I see here posted as optimal for DPS. I've been talking to them and they're really interested in seeing where if anywhere they have room for improvement. Here's a log from our last Gruul's Lair.

Wow Web Stats

Thanks in advance

Scorpids will always have focus to just stack scorpid poison, and the real issue when you have GftT is that claw being on autocast will eat up your pet's cooldown. If you're trying to eek every bit of damage out of your pet, I would leave scorpid poison on autocast and manually claw while scorpid poison is on cooldown.
Animal handler affects scorpid poison, which behaves like a melee attack (you can see it be parried, dodged, and missed in combat logs). I believe the talent affects lightning breath as well, but am not 100% sure on this.

Well, your Hunters could use more than a bit of work, here is what I quickly see on the last (6th) Gruul attempt:
Grawer : Needs to learn about and use Steady Shot. And maybe he should get himself a pet.
Kyoss: Needs to learn about and use Steady Shot.
Moonweasel: Needs to learn about and use Steady Shot.

Frankly, every one of your DPS players looks bad. As a guild you guys have a lot of work to do. But the Hunters in your guild do not understand anything about post-TBC Hunter mechanics except avoiding Aimed Shot. Please have them read any forums, even the official ones, to at least learn about what Steady Shot is and how it should be a mjor part of their damage. Once they get that part we can take a look again, but there is no point even discussing talent specs, optimal pet, or anything else until then.

Hi Dilznic,

The first glaringly obvious error I noticed in these logs, is that your hunters are not using steady shot much. One hunter actually didn't use it at all, in the whole 1400-odd shots he fired.

I'm sure this will solve the problem.

Your hunters need to understand that steady shot is the perfect 'filler' special shot. Special shots consist of:

steady shot
arcane shot
multishot
(any others, but irrelevant)

Because arcane shot and multishot both do more damage than steady shot, these should have precedence, then, only when these 2 shots are on cooldown, you feed in your steady shots to keep up the damage.

So, ideally the sum of all steady shots + arcane shots + multishots should be equal to the number of auto shots fired. This is a 1:1 rotation, one autoshot, followed by one special. Doing this wills see their DPS increase DRAMATICALLY.

For an example:

Your hunter, Kyoss fired:
857 auto shots.
177 multishots
341 arcane shots
0 steady shots

In a perfect world, number of AS = SS+ArS+MS

Kyoss= 857:518. He is using a 1:0.6 ratio. Roughly speaking, he is missing out 40% of oppertunities to fire a special shot. With a very bold guesstimate, he can increase his damage by 20% by adding in those extra shots.

Also, tell them do drop serpent sting, its not mana efficient and the GCD (global cooldown) can be used on something else more beneficial.


Just a quick edit: the 1:1 rotation i mentioned works best for a BM build only, because of the +20% haste talent. Marksmanship or survival builds should look to accomplish a harder 1.1.5 rotation. This means delaying your autoshot to fire 2 specials, so effectively cutting half of the damage of the second special, but still doing overall more damage than the other rotation (of the same spec).

well, one, Moonweasle, is wasting a TON of mana on casting arcane shot all the time and has no macro what so ever for steady shot, since he only cast it 2 times the entire last try of the fight. Steady shot is by far the most mana effecent spell we can use. It costs me 99 mana for an average of 1500 dmg (rough esitmate), and can be used like an extra auto shot if used with a macro/timed properly. His dps will go thru the roof if he uses a simple macro like /castsequence reset=3 Steady Shot, Auto Shot (its what i use)then just does his specials manually since it seems thats how he likes to do it. iI think he could really blow up the meter with a steady shot macro. Also, I sincerly hope that the 10 aimed shits he did were for pulling.

Kyoss...just boot from the raid. if his arcane shot is hitting for under 200, so i can only HOPE he's trying to use a down ranked version, since he had a 'normalish' crit. Downranked arcane shots do not do what they once did. Max rank on that one, though rank 1 multi is still very mana effeicent i hear. That and he didnt use ONE STEADY SHOT AT ALL.

Grawer...he seems to be doing ok, his shots are hitting for good dmg, and he's using steady shot quite a bit. Here is a WWS stats of our Gruul kill for you to compare to if you wish.

Wow Web Stats



ps i broke 1200 burst dps on one of the Kazzak fights!!! >.>

Edit: Zogeth and Cheeky are correct. I always thought of steady shot as a free auto shot while auto shot is casting, so i use it as much as possible.

Hiya folks!

I have two short questions. The first is in regards to cast bars. I currently use Karthu's Hunter Timetrs for my autoshot cast bars, and various timers. I think it works ok, but still feel it's a bit lacking. Is there some other alternative that is more popular and superior in some way?

The second is in regards to gear. With my current gear I feel the best way to get to the hit cap without gimping other stats, by going back to the felstalker set for instance, would be to switch from pure ap and agi gems to agi and + hit gems. Is that a sound assumption?

The Armory

I've read around and decided to to post in this thread (thanks for making it, i've been registered a while but never bothered to post :P) as i'm unsure about certain things about my shot rotation, spec, and my pet.

I understand some of my gear is lacking (i'm not a hardcore raider at all because of having no past pre-tbc, only starting last November) so I was a bit behind starting the leveling to 70 and had a hard time getting into a decent guild. As you can see on my armory i'm BM spec and use the Sunfury bow (bringing my speed to 2.1) and my pet is a cat (King B w/ Cobra Reflexes to be exact, always use him soloing and raiding). In Karazhan I currently get 1-2 on DPS, with some nights being 1-2% above the rogue (who usually places with me) and some nights being a bit lower than him (it changes throughout Kara, we usually end roughly tied). Because of that, it seems like my DPS is fine, but I honestly don't understand what i'm doing (to the point that I feel comfortable). We're currently sitting in Kara until we get a few more recruits/get the ability of more members to be on at once so we can try Gruuls.

One thing i'm confused about is my shot rotation. The big thing is the "hidden 0.5 autoshot cast". Does that cast take place at the end of my cast time (meaning I have 0.1 sec for human error with my steady timing), or am I thinking wrong? I'm currently experimenting with my shot rotation because of bringing that up so i'm no longer putting in arcane and various shots (mainly steady now) because of clipping/GCD/mana problems. If I am correct, wouldn't that mean that when Imp AotH procs that my speed would be too fast and i'd start clipping autoshots if I use steady, or does the cast speed up as well? For all I know i'm talking a load of crap and i'm even more confused than I think :P I know some other parts of my spec should be changed, possibly getting a point into imp revive pet (for when he dies, of course) but i'm not sure what things to switch around. With my current spec my pet has enough HP/Armor to help me kill a lot of junk easily, so I don't want him too squishy!

My pet has the following skills on his taskbar: Claw, Growl, Prowl, Dash
I have prowl autocast off as when its on he does it every minute and falls behind and its a real pain, and I don't use it too much in PvE at all. In PVP its semi-useful but it isn't anything amazing (useful for sneaking in WSG to check on the horde defense). I'm wondering if I should give him bite to replace prowl (I have all the focus talents) to improve his DPS, or just switch pets. I've heard that ravagers do a tiny bit more damage, but I honestly don't think it'd be worth it till the level 69-70 ones in Netherstorm are tameable. I'm not too sure about scorpids as well as it seems confusing and that they may be bugfixed and it would no longer work as well as it does now.

If some of this stuff was already mentioned in the thread, please point it out to be (and where if you don't mind), as a lot of it was personalized to various people and I didn't understand some of it.

Thanks in Advance!

edit: I just downloaded Karthu's timers, which is the one the poster above uses as well. I do have to admit i'm a clicker, as sad and horrible as it is. I'm currently looking for a new keyboard/mouse since this mouse doesn't want to let keys to bind to it (no idea why) and the keyboard has troubles so I don't want to rely on it too much (and i've never learned a lot about various macros and keybinds).

Would anyone mind commenting on my WWS's posted on page 1? I'm always trying to improve how I play my hunter, so comments would be really appreciated.

Thanks

I hear Quartz is a good one for timing shots, but I have yet to use it.

I think it is a decent assumption, but do not underestimate the value of the 4 piece bonus from Beastlord. If you check the WWS I have posted and look at Canislupus you can see he leads the raids quite a bit, and he just raves about that armor reduction. Maybe the Gloves of Quickening off of Maiden would be a good change for you, as I believe they have +hit on them, along with the boots from chess event. Other than that I cant help you much because I focus more on the SV side of huntering.

I'll take a look. My guild has only just started learning Morogrim, so I don't have a great frame of reference for the fight, but I'm going to assume you just DPS Morogrim himself, and leave the adds to the Mages/Warlcoks.

I can see you are BM spec's and your Paladins love you. One thing that is very troubling is that there are 234 Steady Shots but just 205 Auto Shots. I think you are hitting your Steady too soon and clobbering more than 10% of your Auto Shots. This is going to lower both your DPS and your mana efficiency.

(I cannot access Armory from work, so I can verify if the following was totally just bad luck) It also seems like your crit rate is a bit low for T5 content. You should be able to be over 25% raid buffed pretty easily for that gearing level.

Your pet choice and usage is fine. A Scorpid might add 100-150 more DPS in that fight since the Poison stack can be trinketed up and maintained throughout the encounter, but I'm not sure if that is an option for you or not.

Honestly, I think your pretty close to your potential. Remove the clobbered Auto Shots, get some more crit gear (or a Feral Druid) and maybe think about a Scorpid. Other than that you are not an anchor for your guild, but an asset right now.

Thanks.

I'll give Quartz a go. Seems like people in the AddOn forum like it.

As for the gloves, I think the gem's are a better immediate alternative, since they are guranteed to be easily obtainable, while I might have to wait a while for the gloves, if I ever get them.

I might go back to my trusty old Mag'hari leggings though. Mag'hari Huntsman's Leggings - Items - World of Warcraft. They have proved to be a surprisingly excellent quest reward.

I'll also give the Beast Lord set a second chance, at the next opportunity.

judging by your dps and stats, a little bit more crit wouldnt hurt, but other than that you are beyond my limited skills.

You dont see the same DPS on every boss. For Mag I can hit well over 1000, while for Hydross I'm down in the 800 Range, and Void Reaver I'm in the 700's. WWS isn't perfect, nor is every boss fight. Their are tons of factors that go into how much you can DPS, how much damage you are actually doing, etc. Just because your shots are doing comparable damage does not mean anything. I can pick up a 3.0s bow and do the same damage per shot as a MM with a 2.4s bow, but that does not mean we would do the same DPS.

WWS counts downtime in DPS only if you do nothing for more than 5s at a time if I recall correctly. What happens if I run for 4 seconds to avoid an arcane ball and start DPSing again? Or what if I toss out arcane shots as I'm running? I lost a lot of DPS as I was moving, but WWS doesn't count it that way. The place to judge your DPS is on tank'n'spanks, and only if it is the same boss. You can't compare DPS from mag for yourself to Gruul for someone else, for example, because there are a lot of factors that go into it.

Don't try and compare yourself to a hunter that out gears you and has a lot more raiding experience, and especially don't try and draw comparisons on fights that are very bad for judging hunter DPS.

1. I can pick up a 3.0s bow and do the same damage per shot as a MM with a 2.4s bow, but that does not mean we would do the same DPS. - Elaborate pls. I understand AP differences and damage range differences on this are the main factors. What else?

2. What you said on WWS is absolutly correct.

3. Don't try and compare yourself to a hunter that out gears you and has a lot more raiding experience - If we dont compare outselves to our betters, how are we supposed to improve with no marker? Also, as a SV hunter for that fight his gear would be different than his other raiding gear, and besides, how do you know what gear he had on for it? I thought this was the place we avoided assumptions?

Yeah I realise I screwed up on the shot rotation on Morogrim, I'm usually a lot better. The paladin's don't really love me, I just nag a lot to get pet buffs and judgement of wisdom :p

My unbuffed stats are 1982 RAP (with hawk), 24% crit and 145 hit rating. Group buffs were basically just another BM hunter in my group, occasionally I'll get a feral druid in my group and very rarely a shadow priest, but otherwise the hunters kinda get put wherever.

I know a scorpid would be a fair bit more dps, but the way poison works right now just seems unintended and I'd rather not go through the hassle of taming one and getting it's loyalty up for it to be nerfed and become worthless.

I have a question about Scorpid Poison stacking. A few weeks ago I broke down and got a scorpion pet (thanks to the information I found here), and began to use it in raids. Eventually another hunter got a scorpid as well and on our last Kael'Thas attempts I noticed on the trash that there was only 1 stack of poison being applied to mobs (at a much faster rate). We were both using rank 4 poison so I thought "ok that's weird that it stacks but w/e". So I trained rank 5 before the next pull to see what happened. After that 2 stacks began to appear but my combat log (simplecombatlog addon) began to show both stacks ticking for my damage. Now I was really confused. But I think the combat log issue was fixed, we both hadn't named our pets so my combat log was probably assuming both pets were mine. But I didn't get a chance to test it out because I had to switch characters.

But the main question I have is if there can only be 1 rank 4 poison on a mob at a time? If so, then how is the damage calculated? Or was this just another naming issue?

That was in response to the guy who said there shouldnt be any DPS difference. The simple fact is every single boss is different, and allows for different DPS numbers from different classes. But I will elaborate:

1. Damage per shot and damage per second are very different. If I'm firing off a 500 damage shot every 3 seconds while someone else is firing the same 500 damage shot every 2.4 seconds, his DPS will be higher. What you may not be seeing is a) his crit rate may be much higher, b) his pet may be doing a lot more damage, or c) he is firing more shots in the same period of time.

2....

3. Comparing yourself to hunters at your own level is going to be a lot more helpful and meaningful than comparing yourself to a hunter that seriously outgears yourself. You can certainly learn something by looking over Howitzer's WWS, but saying you do the same damage per shot and thus should do the same damage per second is a very slippery slope. I would recommend finding as many WWS of good survival hunters as you can at your own progression level and look them over to see if you actually have a problem. To be quite honest, you might be seeing an issue right now where there is none. For all you know you could be one of the better performing Survival hunters for your gear/progression level.

Now, I would go log a standard tank'n'spank like Gruul or Mag. If your personal DPS is under around 750-800 as a survival spec, I would say there's an issue. 690 DPS as survival on void reaver is not bad for a ranged class that has to constantly run around avoiding large exploding objects.


Edit: If you want a point of reference, here is my first run as a Survival hunter (think i had 850ish Agi fully buffed) on Mag. I was on cube duty, but fortunately since I'm out of combat for longer periods WWS is pretty accurate:
Wow Web Stats

I logged out in PvP gear, so I wouldnt use armory to look at my gear until tomorrow.

What I am confused with, is why do you have such different DPS, if your shot ratio, average shot damage and hit rating seem very similar?

Each rank of the poison rolls its own stack like the old ignite. Each application (from any scorpid) of the same rank will refresh the stack.

Time between shots or rate of fire (whichever you want to call it). This is what makes Don Santos' and Wolfslayer so good.

This is one of the largest factors in determining your potential DPS. As a BM you need to tune your weapon speed and haste to minimize your time between shots with a 1:1 rotation. As a MM or SV you need to tune your rotation as close to 1:1.5 as possible.

Wow Web Stats
(mag trys)

Wow Web Stats (void reaver death)

Wow Web Stats (our last recorded Gruul kill.)

I guess this is not so much for everybody to check out, but more for Kaber. I think the lowest dps I averaged was 689 on VR. So still a bit low maybe. I dunno.

I don't see any glaring problems with your WWS, the ones Cheeky mentioned are easily fixed. If you continue to have problems clobbering shots I'd say try out a macro. The popular opinion here is that is cheapens the experience but I'm no elitist jerk =P I use what works and what makes my life easier.

Regarding the scorpid: Get one.

This is the single biggest thing you could do to boost your dps on a lot of fights, not running one when it could net you 100-200 more dps is really just lazy. I fought against getting one for a while but eventually I just realized my arguments were cover for laziness.

In my opinion, at your level of gearing, the DPS gain by going BM will outweigh the added DPS you are bringing to the raid as SV. It looks like most of your top damage dealers are casters, you seem to be running with about 5 physical damage dealers, most of which aren't even close to 1k dps.

I'm at a similar gear level as you and this is a WWS from last nights Gruul kill

Wow Web Stats

It was far from an optimal performance for me, my pet got stuck in the stupid gate (so I had to go dismiss him and recall after I opened with MD) and I was targeted by cave ins constantly (I had 7 start right on my head). Given all of that I still pulled down 1k dps as BM. I should be able to push 1200 next time if I don't screw up.

Given your raid makeup/performance and gearing I really doubt EW is adding 300+ raid dps.

Last but not least: socket some hit gems

You are sitting at 79 hit rating and have all kinds of crazy gem combinations to get socket bonuses you don't need!

in relation to my gem selections - I didnt put those gems in each one for the set bonus. I put them in for the meta gem bonus, which is 12 agi and 3% crit dmg, but needs 2 reds, 2 yellows, and 2 blues to get it to work. I just put them in places where I could take advantage of some free stat points. For a SV hunter and the amount that I crit, that 3% (which is doubled like the slaying talents) adds up to a ton of damage. So I took the loss on the extra agility.

edit: chess event boots will fix my +hit issue.

Thanks for the thread.

I'm curious on a general look at my gear/setup and welcome to any suggestions. I'm slightly tweaked to be better in PVP, but am basically 41/20/0 BM raid spec'd.

The Armory

I did 790 dps in the entire first 1/2 of Kara last night (including trash, upto Curator, including Nightbane) I did 564 and my pet did 220dps. (No WWS logs to analyze)

I'm using a cat with claw only, and of course avoidance 2 and that fast attack talent (keep forgetting the name).

I also have glove/shoulders/helm of T4 but while it gives me more mana, it's less DPS stats than what I have on armory atm. I had a shadowpriest the entire night for Kara (but not Gruuls).

Also, in Gruul's last night (cleared) I'm pretty consistently lower dps/damage meter rank there than Kara. I think it's a system performance / video lag issue partially, as well as having better competition.. do BM hunters have any tips on how to generate more damage on these fights? Especially Gruul? I'm pretty consistently out dps'd by a Marks hunter on both Gruul and Maulgar. (Huntress, in my guild)

Lastly, I just got the Merciless crossbow, and I noticed a nice jump in dps over my Valanos (never got a ranged kara drop), but I'm still concerned about it's slow speed. Considering my guild gives combat rogues and fury warriors first priority on the DST (*sigh*) what do you all think about the Thundering Skyfire Diamond?

Also, if anyone has a good list of what fights a scorpid is better dps than a cat, and how to use it properly, I'd love to see that.

First to Rakan: your DPS on mag is almost identicle to my own. I don't see any real issues with your rotations or DPS. If you saw in the survival thread where I posted the comparison of BM to Survival and the impact I had on our melee heavy raid... I can honesly say I had very little Impact. I think survival is best suited to a raid where you have lots of very well geared players who are already getting the most they can out of their class. I agree with Glaurong, you really would be better off with a BM spec for the time being. You strike me as the type of player that wants to excel, and when you do it can have a very good domino effect on the rest of your raiders. I plan on going back at the end of the week if I dont see a big improvement in our raid-wide DPS. Something I noticed is our other hunters and DPS slacked off without me there leading the meter, making people work harder because they want to beat me, they want to see their DPS high on the charts. If I'm not up there pushing them, I actually find our raid-wide DPS drops.

Its one thing to look at what survival does from a technical standpoint, but its really interesting to see how these mechanics actually interact with human psychology. All our hunters went down in DPS with me, and for no good reason because they would have all gone up at least 50-100 DPS. Not a single one of our DPS performed up to par. Maybe its because I act cocky when I'm topping the charts - I know it makes people want to beat me for being an arrogant ass, and it makes them get more out of themselves. Even if you dont have the act, people will see you consistently up there and start wondering what they could do better, kind of like how you saw Howitzer's log and wondered what you were doing wrong. That's how I got one of our very subpar hunters to "turn up the good" so to speak, she finally came to me when I was doubling her damage and started asking questions.

I find when we get all our top DPSers on the raid, everyone else does better. It gives them something to strive for and prove to themselves that they are capable of it as well, and they certainly are if they put in the effort. I think once your guild gets to a good place where the DPSers are all solid and doing well, survival will be a good choice again.

OK, enough pep-talk out of me.

Use combo gems. A single Jagged talasite (4 crit/6 stam) counts for both a blue and yellow gem. With only 2 Jagged Talasites, you have the 2 blue and 2 yellow reqs filled and you can socket away with agility on the rest of your gear. If you have a piece of gear with a really good socket bonus, try to use Jagged Talasites and Shifting Nightseye gems to fill them so that you get meta gem requirements filled at the same time as the socket bonus.

Once again, its the fight not the player. You can have the same ratios, and the same damage averages, but what you DONT have is the same number of shots fired in the same period of time. This is going to sound dickish, but please re-read my explanation over again if you do not understand.

Void Reaver: Stand and shoot 20 seconds, start running for 10 while firing off 2 arcane shots. You essentially do 2/3's the DPS of someone who got to stand there for the entire 30 seconds, yet WWS does not count the down time because you were dealing damage on the run. Would I recommend leaving out the arcane shots to boost your DPS numbers? Not a chance, you need to do as much damage to Void Reaver as you can at all times. The total of shots fired, the weapon speed, the amount of haste you are under, how often you move, how often you have to completely stop DPS, and so many other things figure in to your DPS that you cannot just say, "same damage, same ratio, they should have the same DPS."

Again, you are not accounting for any of the following: crit rate, weapon speed, number of shots fired, down time spent moving/healing/bandaging, health/mana potting, etc.

sweet. Thanks.

Try to get the wolfslayer, or go buy Don Santos' gun. The shot speeds are better for BM.

Second, your guild needs to be informed that the DST is a mere 2.5% dps boost for rogues/warriors, probably a bit higher for shaman, but a whopping 7-15% DPS boost for hunters. There is no reason to lock hunters out from getting it aside from greed on the part of rogues that think everything belongs to them.

OK...lets see, I think a scorpid would probably do comparable damage even if its stack got knocked off sometimes, but here are fights where you can keep a full stack for a large portion of the fight.

Karazhan -

Attumen, Opera House, Shade of Aran, Illhoof, Netherspite, Malchezzar, Nightbane

T4 25-mans -

Magtheridon, Gruul, Maulgar

SSC -

Morogrim, Karathress, Vashj (P1/P3)

TK -

None

Hyjal -

Rage Winterchill, Anetheron, Kaz'rogal

BT -

Najentus, Shade of Akama, Teron, Gurtogg, Reliquary, Shahraz, Illdari Council, Illidan (P1/P3)

The way to use scorpid poison is to turn off autocast and send in your pet, then jack your AP as high as you can by using trinkets, and also use BW if you have it, then turn on autocast so that the first stack is applied at maximum damage. Then keep your pet on the boss as much as possible to prevent the stack from falling off.

The most important part is to always use rank 4 or below (if you have multiple scorpids in a raid you'll have to work it out with the other hunters) since rank 5 only has an 8 second duration, which means that one miss will drop your stack. You'll want to put 2/2 in animal handler to reduce misses, and 2/2 in GFTT to provide enough focus to your pet as well.

Did you get my PM regarding their response? I showed them the Haste analysis thread, and other things, and basically they feel that the haste is essentially wasted on hunters versus what they calculate you get from a properly spec'd rogue/fury warrior. I can post that full discussion here, or in a new thread if you think it would be appropriate. The DST certainly has some staunch DW Melee advocates to it, with math they can pummel you with (right or wrong). I don't feel they're trying to be jerks, they just don't see it.

They also have looked at the hunters in 20 top raiding guilds and find it very poorly represented on hunters, whereas it's used by rogues/etc all over the place.

The Lurker Below's resurface tends to correlate very well to the cool downs of Beastial Wrath and [Bloodlust Brooch], making it an excellent boss for a Scorpid as well.

On the one kill I've been at for Lurker, my pet wasn't even on the boss, it was idling by to tank the adds on an island. I'd love to hear about tips on how to both dps the boss and tank adds.

The adds don't necessarily need to be tanked - you have a trap, you're probably on those islands with casters who can sheep or fear, which lets you CC one and burn down one at a time. It goes pretty quickly.

Honestly, it's easier to have healers throw a heal or two to some ranged DPSers being shot than it is to spare another tank to jump across and deal with the adds. If you have a scorpid, it's absolutely worth parking it in the inner ring to stay on Lurker.

Yeah I am still working on my 25 man pallys to consistently buff my pet. They sure do whine sometimes. (anyone know if pets can be setup in Pallypower?)

Tank adds? That's what Tanks, traps, sheep, and fear are for.

I leave my pet on the center island, I stand on one of the outer ones. After fishing him up I usually remember to swap back in my weapon, pop Beastial Wrath and Lust for Blood and send in the Scorpion while I run to my island.

DPS like mad. 20 seconds before the submerge I drop a trap for one of the ranged adds on my island. When Lurker submerges I put my pet on passive (going back to the "stay" spot on the inner island I set for him). I Hunter's Mark the ranged add that won't be trapped. Since they always move to the same exact spots to start firing, this is easy. Me and a Mage/Warlock take out the marked add. I will fast switch to one of the melee adds on the center island being tanked and DPSed by the melee to send my pet it on him. Once the first ranged add is dead we kill the trapped one. Then I help mop up the remaining melee adds. When Lurker re-emerges I pop BW and trinket again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

WWS of last kill.

No, I didnt notice. I dont know who that guy thinks he is or why he thinks the analysis doesnt account for... everything he's talking about, but cheeky's spread sheet 1) accounts for the global cooldown, which for everyone but rogues is 1.5s, and 1s for rogues, and 2) he compares the loss of DPS while using Doomwalker's gun as a reason for hunters not getting anything out of haste when my real purpose was to say that the Barrel-blade is a poor weapon choice for hunters operating under the effects of haste.

No offense, but whoever that is, is trying to hide behind long winded, poorly reasoned arguments that try and circumvent the reality of what the DST does for hunters. I'm sorry, but facts are facts: the DST is a bigger DPS boost for hunters than rogues. He might not want to accept it, and I expect the greedy rogues to go crying on about it, but the DST is the single most powerful item in the game for hunters.

I sure wish I had a way to relate this. Our third dropped last night, and was yet again excluded from it. They're doing a drop priority type thing in effort to avoid a dkp type system (basically classes /roll for it) but I'm really starting to feel screwed over by this, especially since I have the merciless xbow and really could benefit from it. I don't think they're trying to be jerks about it, but considering the guildmaster is a rogue who doesn't have it yet, and the #2 is a warrior, there is a certain predisposition to it based off, if nothing else, their heavy melee experience.

Could someone perhaps assist me in proving (with math) that the DST is the best trinket for hunters? Or, at very least, give a ranking of trinkets? Most of my time doing this stuff is on a Mac, and I don't think the spreadsheet is working properly. (I need to spend some time on it though)

Here is some introductory analysis I did on this trinket. I stand behind the math, but make of it what you will.

Thanks. I see the value, just trying to convey it to the hunter lead/raid officers.

I sent a few PMs with more analysis. Hopefully they made it, because I forgot to save them to my outbox. I fail to see how a rogue gains more from the DST than a hunter. I like how he claims his "new analysis" essentially left enhance shaman out to dry as well. It really does not bode well if the guild leader and his 2nd are a rogue/DPS warrior with their own interests at heart.

Best way you can probably do that is to input all your gear and shot cycles into Cheeky's spreadsheet, note the expected DPS, then switch out one trinket for the DST and note the new expected DPS. Report how much of a % increase in your personal DPS it should create and ask them to do the same for the best rogue in the raid. If your % increase is greater (or even just similar) to the rogue's then you should certainly get equal consideration. No need to prove in the aggregate, just need to prove for your specific case (and maybe the have any other hunters in your raid do the same thing :P ).

That was actually already done in my haste thread, which he used to try and convince the people in charge, who turned around with the most god-awful misinformation I have ever seen to try and claim hunters only gain 2% while rogues and warriors gain well over 20% (and Cheeky's spread sheet is aparently completely inaccurate according to Mr. Rogue that said hunters have a 1s global cooldown). I was honestly floored. Maybe you should post that entire thing so we can get more people breaking it down, Jarynn? This is the "help thread" so I don't think its exactly off-topic to have people helping with the analysis.

It is rather in bad form to post internal guild communication to be picked apart but I'm all for it, sounds fun.

Yeah, I'm not trying to be a jerk here, just convey information. They do a lot of work for the good of the guild, and I'm certainly not out to belittle them in any way.

Quick question.

Merciless Gladiator's Chain Gauntlets or Gauntlets of the Dragonslayer(with 2 16ap gems) for a Marksmanship hunter?

Using Merciless Gladiator's Chain Gauntlets, I lose 54ap(after talents), some int. Gain .92% crit and 4% more damage with Multi-shot. As a BM or survival hunter I would take the Gauntlets of the Dragonslayer without question. Does factoring in the barrage talents make a difference?

I have seen my scorpid poison dmg drop after the trinkets and BW effects fade, is it just me or did someone else also noticed this. When I have 5/5 stacks going it usually tik for 300 -350 depending on my group makeup, but with BW/blood fury and a trinket I can get it up to +600, once the trinket and racial effect fade the scorpid poison dmg drops back to 300. I don't have proof of this atm, can't log in either to test it quick. Can someone else tell me if this is true?

Hello,
I'm Survival spec (7/21/33) and I just picked up [Bracers of the Pathfinder] and enchanted them with 24 ap, but I was wondering if it's better to go with +4 Stats instead? It feels like probably a wash, but pumping up the epeen agility is always nice.

A: Use +8 Agility Gems, Not 16 AP.
B: At most Multishot makes up what? 15% of your overall damage? So that extra 4% would really only increase your overall DPS by .6%? Couple that with the 1.885% increase from the crit you gain gives you a 2.48% increase in dps. Couple this with the 77 AP you gain.

vs.

The Guantlets of the Dragonslayer give you 1% critical which equates to about a 1.3% increase in dps and 104 AP.

So in essence you are comparing 1.18% DPS vs 27 AP.

Worst case scenario, you average 600 dps. That 1.18% would grant you 7 dps.
The 27 AP would grant you about 6 dps if you have perfect timing (LOL Who has that).

They seem pretty even to me personally, so it comes down to personal preference. Do you want more mana or more stamina? (PvPing, go with the Gladiator Gloves ;-) )

The .1% crit you gain and the 1.15 AP additional you give to each melee class has a hard time catching up to the DPS you gain from 24 AP.

Just tested this and its still working the way it always has. Maybe you had Stormstrike active on the mob which just happen to fall off at the same time as BW/Trinkets faded ?
That would cause a 20% drop in damage.

I think that might be the cause of the drop in dmg. It was on Tidewalker when I noticed the change in the dot tiks, maybe the stack broke and I never saw it. Hate those late night raids.

I'm just wondering if you guys have any tips and tricks on pet positioning. Obviously you'd want to have the pet attacking the boss from behind to avoid dodge/parry. My problem is that it seems that a lot of time the boss does move around a bit, gets turned or something and that moving myself so I am facing the boss' back isn't always feasible or even a good trade-off. One thing that was mentioned was that one can put a pet on stay somewhere which causes a follow to make the pet return to it's stay spot!?

Are your tanks really aware of the pets and try to position the boss correctly?

Any tips will be appreciated...

I love the idea of asking the main tank to turn the boss mob round slightly so Kitty and Snippy can get to his hamstrings better... Let me know how your tanks respond!

The tip you can use is to set a pet to "stay" at a particular point - say behind where the boss will be tanked. Then the attack command will get them to charge in from behind. Putting the pet on passive should then return the pet to the original "stay" spot.

The problem with this for me is that it can cause problems with distance, certainly for trying to cast a quick mend pet, and also potentially despawning the pet if you've moved to far away.

Personally i tend to be happier to have the pet recalled back to me, especially on fights where i don't have my mana priest, so that i can drop heals on him.

I'm pretty concerned about the damage my shots are hitting for. I'm well geared and feel like they should be doing a great deal more when they find the target. One of the main concerns in my game currently is Hunters Mark, and I feel it could be hurting me a lot. How do people go about making sure it's always up? It's so easy to lose track of time when concentrating on complicated raid bosses, managing pets and rotations.

Logs from Void Reaver last night:
Wow Web Stats

Autoshot averaging 535 for someone with my gear is embarrassing. I must be doing something very wrong.

And constructive criticism appreciated

Try using this addon:

Debuff Filter | World of Warcraft @ Curse.com

Its called Debuff Filter, allows you to filter debuffs/buffs on your current target (or yourself) and displays them at a size and position of your choice ^^. Its helped me a lot with HM and Scorpid sting, as well as realising how often Expose Weakness is up Hope this helps.

While I can't access your armory to check your gear, I'm going to assume you have pretty much Karazhan quality and above in all slots.

You have a 202:183 Auto:Special ratio, which is pretty good in a movement intensive fight. Your shot damage does seem a little low, my logs of the same fight from last night show a ~60 damage/shot difference, and my gear is T4 with the [Void Reaver Greaves] thrown in. Now, I had a Survival Hunter for Expose Weakness last night (~225 AP) and Hunter's Mark was up 100% of the time.

Sorren's Hunter timer mod provides a nice countdown of Hunter's Mark if you are responsible for refreshing it. Are any of the 4 Hunters Survival spec'd? If not your raid would see a nice bump in having one re-spec.

This was posted back on page 1, I was wondering if anyone had a chance to discuss it. I couldn't quite find an answer through my reading/skimming of the entire thread.

I always assumed the DPS on the ranged weapon meant it would do more damage regardless of the speed. The only thing that would affect this would be all the other shots you fit into the rotation?

R

Do you pick one hunter in the raid and make him or her resbonsible for Hunters Mark? I'm not sure I trust the others.

Yep my gear is Kara or better.
[Cowl of Defiance]
[Beastmaw Pauldrons]
[Primalstrike Vest]
[Primalstrike Bracers]
[Belt of the Black Eagle]
[Gloves of Quickening]
[Crystalweave Cape]
[Midnight Legguards]
[Legacy]
[Don Santos' Famous Hunting Rifle]
[Ring of a Thousand Marks]
[Hourglass of the Unraveller]
[Core of Ar'kelos]
[Boots of Utter Darkness]


We don't have a survival. Pretty much all BM, but the other hunters have very poor pet management and often dont use them in fights, which means no buff. However, 225ap isnt going to give me an extra 60 damage per shot, is it?

Could poor Hunters Mark management be responsible for my weak shots?

The main problem is, if someone with improved mark puts it on, i don't get a cooldown and lose all track. I find it very confusing when healing pets and dodging 6k arcane missiles, when to refresh.

In this particular encounter my party was very poor in terms of buffs for me, I'd have hoped to see more than 535 per hit though.

Ooh. That looks like something that migh thelp me improve my game a lot. Thanks for the heads up. I'll install it in the morning and give it a test run.

Hey guys, I have a 70 BM specced Hunter on Blackhand, and I've just started raiding with my guild. So far, so good, I get nothing but compliments and so forth, but after reading some of these posts I want to see if the more experienced Hunters on this forum can give me some pointers on how to take my game to the next level so to speak.

The Armory

There's my armory page.

Currently I use a macro for my shot rotation that a friend suggested, which basically perpetually alternates between auto shot and steady shot, but I fear that just spamming those two shots may be too simple. I've read the post on ideal shot rotation, and I agree with it, but my problem is how to best utilize its advice? It seems to say, "Yes, alternate between auto shot and steady shot, but occasionally throw a Kill Command and an Arcane Shot into the mix." Is this more or less what it suggests? And if so, should I make a second macro for Kill Command and Arcane Shot or should I manually click them? And finally, are there any mods for Hunters out there that're recommended? Currently I just use the Hunter AEP mod for gear comparisons, but any other things to make my life easier would be appreciated.

I'm not too proud to take pointers even at 70, so any advice is welcome, though I'd prefer well-reasoned advice with some small paragraph explaining why it's a good idea, if possible.

Thanks in advance.

My first piece of advice is drop 2 points from endurance training and pick up improved rez, it is incredibly important to be capable of getting your pet up and back into the fight quickly if it dies.

Some leading questions:
Does your Arcane Shot do more damage on average than your Steady Shot?
Does your Multi-Shot do more damage on average than your Steady Shot?
Do you end any given fight with mana available (either directly or through consumables)?

Quick question off topic.... does +weapon damage work with ranged weapons?

It works, but our shots are so infrequent that it's usually a poor stat for us.

I can provide a before/after WWS of A Gruul fight(s) with the trinket. Same gear and spec otherwise:

Gruul Kill w/out DST typically 900-950ish DPS:
Wow Web Stats
Gruul Kill w DST typically 1000-1060 DPS:
Wow Web Stats


As BM spec I gained 100 DPS minimum with it. As MM/SV it would be more like 200.
Thats like a 10%-20% gain without breaking a sweat...

I believe +Weapon Damage works on Steady Shot. The ring enchant is the same spell effect as Furious Howl, which I seem to remember affected Steady Shot's damage.

Steady Shot is showing more damage than the Arcane Shot.

I'm not sure, it says it does +206 bonus damage for Multi while Steady comes up as 667 damage if they're not dazed.

I usually end fights with plenty of mana available (to the point where drinking isn't a must) unless it's a heavy boss fight. This is before considering consumables.

I'd suggest dropping bestial swiftness, removing three points from endurance, and maxing out improved revive and improved mend. Endurance is nice, but you will gain far more benefit from the other two.

You've got a really nice weapon, but it's fairly slow-ish. I'd stick minor haste enchant on your gloves and try and pick up Crystalweave Cape of AH. It's an oddly unpopular item and I see it regularly for around 80-100g.

The dps shown on the tooltip of the ranged weapon is simply the math of the the weapon damage versus the speed. The spreadsheet accounts for how gear (attack power, crit, hit, haste) used in a maximized dps rotation will affect total dps. So the Sniper Rifle has a lower damage range, but with how the change in speed of the weapon affects the overall shot rotation, there is less dead time waiting on an Auto Shot, so more shots are fired, and more damage done. Remember that the weapon's dps does not affect steady shot, so the damage gained by firing more Steady Shots in this example outweighs the loss of a little damage on the Auto Shots.

Keep in mind Steady Shot's tooltip is incorrect. Arcane Shot will, in most cases, deal more damage than Steady Shot due to armor mitigation.
Multi-Shot will also in most cases deal more damage than Steady Shot.
Thus, especially since you have mana to spare, using one of the above instead of Steady Shot will increase your DPS slightly (although at a heavy mana cost).

Other than that, practice to time your shots better will be the major influence, I think.

This is incorrect. Steady Shot's formula includes WeaponDamage (or rather, WeaponDPS*2.8), but the tooltip does not. The tooltip is slated to be fixed in an upcoming patch.

Ah, I see. My apologies, was not trying to spread misinformation. So to clarify, a 95 dps weapon will have a 95*2.8=266 added to the tooltip giving 266+RAP*0.3+150?

Well, judging by your gear, you have more experience than I, but I still wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to switch those stamina gems in your Netherscale set for +8 Ap and 2 Mp/5 gems. You seem to have a pretty decent amount of stamina already so I imagine the extra dps from those gems could be worth more than a couple hundred hitpoints. More experienced hunters might tell me I'm wrong abot that though.

I also have another question for myself.

I've been thinking about tweaking my spec a bit from my current one:

The Armory

to the following:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft.

Is that a sensible change? It might be minor, but I suspect that a bit of IAotH and 2/2 Animal Handler is worth more than a bit of Health and armor for me and my pet.

No, not quite.
150 + (WeaponDamage/WeaponSpeed)*2.8 + 0.2*RAP + [Dazed: 175]
I.e. RAP scaling is only 20%, not 30%.


When talking about average damage, (WeaponDamage/WeaponSpeed)*2.8 = WeaponDPS*2.8

My question is simple, do BM hunters (when using a Scorpid) have claw on autocast as well as scorpid poison Rank 4. It just seems to interfere way to much with keeping scorpid poison up, so should i just try doing it manually? Or just get rid of it. And if i do get rid of claw how much of a dps loss is that? I have no focus problems, plenty from Gftt and bestial discipline.

Decided to add a related question, what exactly are the mechanics of scorpid poison when 2 pets are in the raid? Does it basically refresh it for you if you get the first poison up? And who gets the damage from it?

Is kill command worth it? I realize its off the GCD but due to the fact it delays auto shot by .5 seconds with the macro i use, is the damage worth the delay?

Also, is there a mod that solely tracks the autoshot cast?

I have no easy answer to the KC question.
For me its alot about feel, does it feel like you with the current given haste(none,quick shots or dst) you have are able to fit in a KC in your rotation.

It also depends very much on what group you are in, if you are in a group with an enhancement shaman who throws strength of earth and gives you and your pet the 10% ap buff, is the mob fully sundered etc. KC scales very well with those kinda things.

So sometimes yes, sometimes no, its definetly a fun thing to use and use right

I was missed ;_;
Just got my Thick Netherscale Breastplate today
edit: I tend to go into too much detail, feel free to skim.

Gjorn and Lactose, thank you muchly for your advice. I'll see what I can do. However, does that mean my gear is satisfactory, my stats are satisfactory? I've been pondering what, as a BM spec Hunter, to do next. Should I change my talents? And finally, should I utilize the macro I've been using still, or should I use it along with an Arcane Shot + Kill Command macro, or is there a macro to combine these two, or should I stick to clicking?

I apologize for the barrage of questions, but I'm just at a moment with my Hunter (especially now that I've started raiding) where I'm very self-conscious and really want to work out the kinks, hopefully achieving the status of not merely "good Hunter" but "awesome Hunter".

Thanks for your input, again.

Personally, I think I've found how to use KC to suit me without worrying about delaying shots. I'm BM specced and using a simple Auto-Steady rotation. But when I have KC enabled and also Arcane Shot off the cooldown, instead of the next Steady Shot I'd fire an Arcane and immeidately press KC. Thus the GCD "rotation" is not affected since I'm pressing KC during the GCD after the Arcane Shot, and by replacing the Steady with an Arcane+KC I'm getting a small DPS-boost (I hope^^) without affecting the Autoshot cycle.

I'm not sold on imp revive pet.

Granted my guild is only in SSC/TK, but so far my pet rarely dies on boss fights, and a lot of the times it's during wipes or near the end of the fight.

Even talented, revive pet costs almost half of your mana bar, and 4 seconds to cast. On top of that you now have a content or unhappy pet, which you have to spend more mana/GCD to mend.

IMO unless you get a shadow priest on every raid and are crappy at pet management, this talent isn't worth it.

Can some of the more progressed BM hunters share their opinion on this?

IMO this talent is extremely worthwhile as long as you are going deeper into the BM tree. What else would you spend points on? Thick hide, IAotM, and endurance training are all pretty crappy with regard to pve dps. Sometimes you can get unlucky and a pet can get owned early on in a fight, and spending 5.5 seconds for a rez and mendpet is definitely worth gaining back 25% or so of your total dps, imo.

Even as MM I would pick up this talent on the way to unleashed fury.

Gurtogg (BT) - One Fel Acid Breath would kill it over time. Last kill I had to res my pet 4 times since it was targeted for Fel Acid Breath.
Archimonde (Hyjal) - One word... Doomfire. It sucks, I spend a lot of time reviving my pet on that fight.

Since both of these spells arent classified as AoE damage, avoidance does not help and your pet takes full damage from it.

Those 2 fights are the main reason I have 2/2 Imp Revive pet. Most of the time I am stuck in a non-shadow priest group and pet management helps, but the damage is so high you cant help it.

Armor value in PvE raiding is almost utterly useless. It has little/no benefit to either you or your pet.

IAotH and FF are two of the most powerful talent selections available. As long as you can handle the haste, and manage your pet well, these two should be maxed and you will see a large dps boost from them.

The DPS benefit you take from each point in Frenzy diminishes greatly the more points you take in it. Each point gives you about half as much juice as the last one. The difference in 4/5 in frenzy and 5/5 is next to nothing(going by cheeky's sheet). So, yeah, stick one of its points in Animal Handler.

Leotheras the blind will also kill your pet if he gets a rend on him. Imp revive pet is a must if you don't exactly know when to use you pet on Leo.

Sorry to butt in to the conversation here. But this seemed like the best place to ask this question. I'm currently working on getting Excel so I can use the spreadsheets myself, but can anyone tell me what kind of dps I should be able to put out with my current gear and spec?

The Armory

Also, how about a link to the best possible dps build? Thank you. (I'm noob)

Thanks, Carlaena. I'm sticking with just two points of IAotH for the moment though. I'll see how I handle the minor haste increase before I get those final points.

Malvan, your gear seems well balanced enough. However I'd change my leg enchant to Cobrahide Leg Armor - Items - World of Warcraft. That would give a very nice increase in dps.

Since you are at 375 LW, as I, I'd also try and get hold of this pattern, Pattern: Boots of the Crimson Hawk - Items - World of Warcraft. On my server the pattern is usually fairly affordable and the mats are fairly easy to gather, and it's a nice upgrade over pretty much anything pre-SSC.

I could see you taking a point out of frenzy, with cobra reflexes your pet attacks fast enough to keep it up most of the time anyway. Also, take that point out of Catlike Reflexes and put 2 points into Animal Handler.

As for DPS, going off of what I currently do, I hit 950-1250 DPS selfbuffed depending using CombatStats but that mod is a function of how much DPS you are doing right now and not overtime. So I could probably see you doing 750-1000 DPS just because you have 400 RAP less then I do.

Last night at Tidewalker, I had the best luck in the world on my scorpid poison. I was expecting to see my dps as one of my best yet on the fight. (We wiped at 1% though... how awful is that!) I can't link the wws report because it's sort of screwy in that it changed our names, and it only shows one attempt and at 30 minutes long? (I have to try redoing it at home.)

Anyway, I think I botched my shot rotation pretty bad, but one thing I noticed as sorta odd... I actually had to pull my pet off Tidewalker to avoid him pulling aggro! Does this happen just because he had an insane tick going? (900+ for about 4 minutes or so) Or is the tank generating low tps, or a combo of both? Man it was so hard to purposefully break that tick too!

I think my rotation has suffered since reading so deeply into things. Like, I overthink it or something now. I find myself staring at quartz, waiting for that one little flipping millisecond to cast my next steady.

I don't use arcane/multi because I do tend to have mana issues on intense fights and I am almost NEVER in a spriest group. I find that often times, I get hung up on the first tick of IAotH, usually clipping an auto on those cases due to the shift in timing. And likewise, when the proc wears off seems to be another trouble spot. I really don't like that I am so intently watching one set of cast bars either. Are there other methods that will allow me more focus elsewhere? Or is there another timer mod that might let me fiddle with things more.

KC also throws off my rotation, but I don't use any macros, so I am not sure how to incorporate that in for ease of use.

Half the mana bar? Thats a horrible exageration. Pets do die on boss fights and when that pet makes up 20-30% of your total damage, not rezzing it does you far more damage than the mana hit. 4 seconds to get your pet up and back in the fight is hardly "gimping your damage" when that 4 seconds just brought back a substantial chunk of your DPS, so what if it goes down a level to content. I guarantee you get more damage out of the pet than you do by spending the mana from rezzing it on shots instead. There are rare exceptions like Alar in phase 1, but they are few and far between.

Thanks again Gjorn. One last question though: Do I have too much Stamina? I know it seems odd, but should I replace some of my stars of elune for AP/Crit gems? At the moment it seems I've got a lot more HP than I need, and since you suggested the armor kit change, I'm wondering if you think I do. And if so, how much HP is good to stay at for now?

The only place to stack stamina is in PvP. For PvE I always go after agility gems (except on the Ebon Netherscale set, since it has great set bonuses), and mix in Jagged Talasites as needed to meet meta gem requirements. Click my armory link to see what I did with my gem choices - I generally ignore any set bonus that would give me worse stats than if I put nothing but +8 agility gems in the slot. Its based on AEP valuations, so it may help you to look it over, but I find most BM stats follow this curve:

1agi = 10 pts
1crit = 9 pts
1hit = 13 pts
1ap = 4 pts

So if I have the breastplate, I calculate it out like this: I can socket 8 crit, and 2 nightseyes with 4agi/6stam to get my +4 agility bonus. Thats 12 agi and 8 crit for a total of 192 points, plus 120 HP. Alternatively I could stack 3 gems with 8 agi for 24 total, which is 240 points. When Meta gem requirements are thrown into the mix, I figure out which combination of sockets gives me the best over-all bonuses (as you can see I picked my belt, the helm/bracer have crit only because the socket bonuses make it worthwhile).

If you are under 136 hit rating, sockets are a great place to make up the difference since it is the cheapest and most effective stat for boosting DPS.

If this is the case, I'm a terrible hunter. I generally average about 420-450 DPS in a 5-man. Is this about right? Or do I need to see what I can do on Dr. Boom?

I would guess that the meter you're using is a full-instance run. Most of the numbers that people here are putting up are single-fight numbers. During a full run, especially of a 5 man instance in which you (naturally) will get bored and slack off, I can see how your numbers would be considerably lower.

Also, your gear seems to suggest that you exclusively run 5 man instances. The numbers Grogzor gave you are more like raid numbers, meaning that you would have many more buffs. In a 5 man, you may not even have Kings or Might while in a raid it is possible that you could have Kings, Might, Wisdom, LotP, GoA, and/or BShout.

Is that over the entire instance or just on a boss?
Dr. Boom isn't really a good indicator for BM hunters on your total DPS output because your can't use pets. I recommend using the Blasted Lands mobs. It will be higher then what you would actually do but it still gives a somewhat ok representation.

Also, if you need macro help

/script UIErrorsFrame:Hide()
/cast [target=pet, dead]; [pet] Kill Command
/castsequence reset=2/target/combat Auto Shot, Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/script UIErrorsFrame:Show()

Is what I use, I put it onto my mouse scroll and spam it that way. Supposedly, the Kill Command delays the Auto Attack but I generally don't notice it that much in terms of hurting my DPS.

Yes, that's a full run, I'll go try a BL mob and see what I can do, and yeah it's in a 5-man, I haven't quite gotten to raiding and I'm not putting much time into the character yet, I'm currently powerleveling a new hunter on a pvp server where I'll probably spend more time. But yeah, that's with almost no real buffs up, and I never slack in instances, I don't blow my cooldowns EVERY time they're up, but I use them a lot, and always on bosses.

Thanks for the macro, I'll have to give that a try, also I'm going to pick up a scorpid soon.

Also, any tips on a meter I should use? I'm using SW Stats as is atm.

Edit: Ok, DPS test run, and until I ran OOM, I was putting out about 850 on a level 57 Servant of Razelikh, with AotH, Hunter's Mark, and no other buffs, aside from procs. Scorpid Poison is ticking for 381, after trinket/BM stack.

I hear good things about SW Stats but I still use DamageMeter. I recommend using CombatStats because it lets you know how you are doing now and it keeps a track record over as long as you want of things like hits and misses and such.

For your trinkets, be careful where you use them because they could take away one of your shots and that would be like taking from Peter to feed Paul (Booya, I used it).

Latsly, scorpids getting nurfed pretty bad.

So when is the best time to use a trinket? Also, scorpids will get nerfed, but until they do, may as well use them. In my dps test, I know I nuked a couple auto shots with SS, mostly cause of random latency stuffs.

Edit: Also, how can I find out what the best gear to go for is? I've been going for gear with Crit/AP mostly, but is that right? Is my leather gear good, or am I just stupid?

Hello there Can you please show the source of what are you saying? Thx

That is so sad Instead of making more pets scaling with our gear.. they destroy our best raid pet.

I'd be careful with using set numbers like that.

Firstly, I'm pretty certain you undervalue AP and overvalue Crit, in relation to Agil. Secondly, as you get more and more of a stat, it becomes less beneficial to you. So balance is important.

Something I am fairly confident about is that:
-if you're BM (with kings) 1 Agil > 2 AP > 1 Crit
-if you're BM(without kings) 2AP > 1 Agil > 1 Crit
-if you're SV, 1 Agil > all, at any point.

Why is this?

I'm not totally convinced on this, but maybe i am missing something really simple, please expand.

Omitting talents like Lightning reflexes and Master marksman, why do stats become less beneficial with increased quantity?

Edit: Is there some kind of coefficient i should know about?

Nope, just that adding 10 AP is a 1% increase if you have 1000, and a 0.5% increase if you have 2000. So if you have lots of AP and low crit, you'll get more bang for your buck from adding more crit than adding more AP

Personally, the best trinkets are probably ones with procs ie Hourglass of the Unraveler but if you are using an activated trinket, the best times to use it are either when you have to move to a new spot or right after you FD, then its not so much a problem.

There is nothing wrong with wearing leather but the biggest thing you can probably do is get rid of those damn greens.

Its a good idea to make a macro to activate both Bloodlust Brooch and Bestial Wrath. They are both on a 2 min cooldown, and you will get more bang for your buck if you use the trinket then.

(Thats if you are BM and have this trinket!)

Hi Guys,

I had a question about the Survival Talent "Surefooted". I recently respecced as a Survival Hunter, with 3 points into Surefooted for the additional 3% hit rating. However, when I looked at my character statistics, I did not see an improvement on my hit rating (I manually added my gear hit rating points, and got the same value as my character's cumulative rating). I had spoke to a GM asking if this 'working as intended', and after taking my gear off, I still did not see the intended hit rating boost (naked I had a 0 hit rating). He said they were going to investigate the matter and to check the main site for updates, but that doesn't help me immediately.

I was curious to know if anyone had any experience or information regarding this, or perhaps has had this same problem occur? Any info that can be shed is appreciated, thanks! I've listed my armory profile below just for good measure.

Armory Profile

Yeah it's really simple mate.

All attack power does is increase the damage of every shot. More attack power makes all your shots hit harder. The harder your shots hit, the more damage you will gain when a critical strike occurs. So the higher your attack power, the more benefit you will gain from each critical strike.

It's not that stats become less beneficial, it's just that the importance of the other goes up as you improve one, and vice versa.

Surefooted doesn't add +Hit Rating. Surefooted adds pure +Hit Chance.
The character sheet does not show +Hit Chance.
Surefooted works, you just don't see the gain in your character sheet, due to how it's set up.

Just ask for the paladins to put salv on your pet. Pet do have some weird aggro issues on tidewalker, but luckily salv sorts those problems out.

Easiest way to use KC is to wait for your auto shot to fire. If KC is up, use it followed by your special shot immediately. You can't clip a shot that way and its not too hard to manage.

And thus the required hit rating to cap moves from being 136 to, I believe, around 86. This is the number I ask all my hunters to have or aim for if they have Surefooted, and 136 if they don't.

89 is the magic number with 3/3 surefooted. Unless you are using a weapon that your class has a +5 bonus to, in which case I think you can drop 5-10 points from HR and still be capped.

im sorry if this is violating any rules and such, but i dont have permission to start a new thread so i thought of posting a question here. No offence would be taken if this reply were to be deleted etc.

I was wondering, as a troll hunter, what are the exact benefits of +5bow skill?

How much dmg, if any, does it increase
how much +hit does it increase, so the maximum hit rating (137) for me would be lower
does it increase my crit%, if so, how much?

i would love to know if anyone has done any experiments regarding the +5bow skill, the troll racial passive



thank you

Recount is by far the best meter I've used. Beyond a simple meter it is an amazing analysis tool

I too love Recount, just started using it about a week ago. My only issue is that it tends to read higher DPS totals, by a fair bit, than something like SWStats. I don't actually know how Recount works exactly, but any periods of no combat that last longer than a few seconds seem to not count against you in terms of the recorded DPS. In movement heavy fights, I could certainly see this giving you a rather inflated looking total (Example being a Prince kill where we had some HORRID luck with the elementals...lots of moving around, SWstats ended up showing me at ~720 dps, while Recount listed it at much closer to 980).

Which leads me to a question, sort of: Is there a way to turn that off in Recount, or is that just how Recount works? I'll continue to use recount for checking my auto:special ratios and what not, for sure. But, unless I really want to stroke my e-peen, might it still be best to keep SWStats around for a "better" reading of DPS? Or is the way Recount records DPS considered the "correct" way? I know this might be slightly off-topic from the thread, but as best as I can tell, it's still somewhat suited for here.

Use the search function of these forums.
Hunter Spreadsheets -- In development -- a search for 'troll racial'.

I was wondering if you guys could help me with this 2 questions:

Gem:
I'm getting the s2 arena chest and I'm not sure what gems to put on, i would also like to replace the ones that i have in my gloves (using those because of the meta in the helm).

Belt:
Both good belts still not sure which to use (depends of gem for chest).

My stats with Girdle of the Prowler
1813ap
148hit
24.43crit

My stats with Marshal's Chain Girdle
1797ap
131hit
25.12crit

My armory: The Armory

Thanks

SWStats shows you "encounter dps," all your damage done, divided by the time in combat.

Recount shows you "effective dps," all your damage done, divided by the time you were actively DPSing.

There are other ways to see DPS with Recount though, I suggest you check out the realtime graphs. They are really nice for seeing "current dps" and measuring the value of stuff like procs.

I'm debating on how to spec my hunter for optimal raid dps. I'll start raiding on this character this week, and I'm just not on the up and up of how to spec at a particular level of gear. At the moment, the character is sort of a PvPish build, but it's BM so I can pump out a bit of dps in PvE as well.

Summation: I'm wondering if Survival is a more effective spec for me to take as I am currently geared.

Armory

I'll be doing Gruul, Mag, Kara, and Void Reaver for sure, with some added attempts at SSC and other Eye stuffs.

Right now I'm thinking my best bet for high dps as survival would be
this, but I can't say for sure obviously. How does survival really perform at lower gear levels? Is that build appropriate for my level of gear? I went 2/3 EW because that skill seems to be more effective only when you can keep it up more often with higher crit. MT looks like it is just what I need to get my crit higher, as well.

For most DPS related stuff (with this and this gear, what's my expected DPS, which item is better, etc), a nice start is by plugging your stats in Cheeky's Spreadsheet, found here.
I don't think anyone wants to check through everyone's Armory link and give gear upgrade advice, at least not if you haven't done anything to see for yourself.
Input gear, swap talents around, and compare.

Thanks

Oh, I realize that. Maybe I worded my last post poorly. When you're discussing people's DPS for certain encounters, which one of those (Effective deeps via Recount, or encounter dps via SWStats) is normally the DPS that people use for said discussions? Because, obviously, saying you can pump out 900 DPS on a given fight doesn't mean the same thing if you're using Recount as opposed to SWStats.

WWS seems to be one of the better judging tools I've seen...which way does that incorporate DPS?

And, yes, I've checked out a lot of the stuff that Recount has to offer. You're absolutely right, the graphs and other features are invaluable.

Oh, I'm not concerned with gear advice, I've got a pretty good idea what I want to upgrade, and how to socket and such. I was mainly just wondering how gear dependant the different specs are. I am at 1274 AP, 434 agi, 6208 Mana, 111 hit, 20.48% crit. I was just wondering if that's a level of gear capable of speccing survival to greater effect than say, BM or MM. If it's not cut and dry I understand, but I'm definitely not asking for gear advice.

I don't think you have enough agility to pull off a survival spec. Usually people reccomend that you hit at least 500 agi, unbuffed, before the gain from exposed weakness becomes worthwile. Survival is, as I understand it, the most gear dependant of all hunter specs.

At low gear levels common wisdom seems to be to go for BM, at the moment. Some of the more knowledgable posters might be able to give you a more reasoned answer though.

WWS is closer to Recount than SWStats but it's definition of "actively DPSing" is slightly different. I believe the WWS parser cuts out any inactivity of more than 5 seconds out of the time you are considered present and actively dpsing.

For these discussions WWS is probably the most common benchmark as you can easily show it to others. That really has two numbers of importance though, DPS and DPS Time, you obviously want to maximize both.

I plan on continuing to use a scorpid till 2.2 so i wanted to know, do you keep claw on auto cast? Ive had a terrible problem of scorpid poisin continuously being knocked off and i suspect it may be because of the amount of focus being dumped into claw.

Why would you rapid fire when bloodlusted?

Bloodlust ends, then rapid, then haste trinket ( if have ) , then racial. The haste makes your rotation more efficient and yes there is haste over kill, you want to stay hasted for as long as possible w/o stacking tons of haste. There is no reason to rapid fire when you are bloodlusted.

I have never used claw with my scorpid. Compared to a monster poison stack it is insignificant DPS and not worth missing one of your two chances to keep the stack rolling.

Unless you are nearly out of mana, your potions are on cooldown, whatever you are fighting is at 1% and the raid leader is screaming over vent "BURN BURN BURN!"

Survival is only effective if you have a large number of physical DPSers getting the most out of their class. We have a number of great ones in my guild, but not enough on any given raid to make survival a worthwhile spec for me. Personally, I feel MM and Survival are both best left to about the time where you are progressing out of SSC and TK and moving into Hyjal and BT. Until then BM is your best bet.

Also, you are heavily gimping your personal DPS by not having Improved Aspect of the Hawk. As a BM hunter, it is just as much a bread-and-butter skill as Serpent's Swiftness.

When in doubt for arena gear, I go with Shifting Nightseye and Jagged Talasite. Both DPS and stamina, you really can't go wrong. You will need to plug your belts into a DPS spread sheet, no one is going to go to the trouble of putting all your gear into a spread sheet when you should be doing it yourself.

Personally, I've found 134 to be just as acceptable at 136 (No Surefooted). It's 0.1% miss rate, which is around 1 in a 1000 if I did my mental math correct. Of course hit 136 if possible, but for me, maybe luck, but I haven't missed a boss to my knowledge, but I might not have noticed it due to pet missing. Basically you'd missed 3-4 times on a boss using your entire quiver.

For me, I've saved some hit items for replacements like [Sonic Spear] and the [Girdle of the Prowler] namely. My planned upgrades would keep me at hit cap, but that's another story.

I'm working at possibly trying to get enough agi gear for a good survival build. Right now I'm at 520 unbuffed agi with a few more things in my possession that can buff this (sonic spear, using +15 gloves enchant, some other gear modifications). My raid is working on early SSC right now so I'm wondering what kind of raid buffed agi I should be shooting for. Also I'm currently MM spec. Would I be using a similar rotation as Survival?

My suggestion would be to try and obtain about 600+ first. You might need some leather, but to do so...
- Only use the 8 agility gems. Nothing more, nothing less. If you want to be survival, this is your only option except with few scenarios. Bonus is 3-4 agility and it's red and blue sockets. Use a 8 agility and a 4 agility/6 stam gem.

-35 agility to your weapon.

-[Skulker's Greaves] are really nice.

-Beast Lord shoulders are better than your T3 using double agility.

Its possible to get 600+ agility as MM/BM in early SSC without to much work using the right gems and enchants, and you can get it higher if you want to gimp other stats and use agi heavy gear like fel stalker bracer...
600 before LR and BoK and food etc gives you 800+ buffed and thats a nice raid buff.

A survival use a rotation similar to a MM hunter ( 1:1.5 )

Sounds good. I know the + 8 agi gems are good but is it worth meeting the gem requirements for the 12agi 3% crit meta gem? With the increase in crits I'd be seeing that seems like it would be a nice boost to personal dps without giving up too much agi.

Can anyone post a good raid macro for max sustained dps? I have a 2.8 speed bow and am 41/20/0. Jus tlooking for some options. Thanks!

/script UIErrorsFrame:Hide()
/cast [target=pet, dead]; [pet] Kill Command
/castsequence reset=2/target/combat Auto Shot, Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/script UIErrorsFrame:Show()

Seems to work just fine for me, the only issue is sometimes after Feign Deathing, I have to wait like 2-3 seconds before it will let me even start DPSing again, not sure why.

Because the macro does not allow you to fire Steady Shot before Auto Shot has been fired.
When you 'release' from Feign Death, your Auto Shot timer is reset back to Weapon Speed (unhasted).
If you were to swap 'Auto Shot' and 'Steady Shot' in your macro, you would no longer have this problem.

Where does Lightening Breath go in the macro if you have a Windserp and don't want it to run off to cast LB? An example would be greatly appreciated.

Check my gear(sig) its easy to get mostly and does its job at SV. (I still compete with best rogues/locks/bm hunter for top5 all the time)

I think meeting requirements for Relentless meta is worth it, its not much of a problem either as some gear has ok socket bonuses (Fiend Slayer Boots - Items - World of Warcraft red+blue=3agi bonus - so you loose only 1agi(and gain 6sta) with 8agi+4agi/6sta gem)

In raids I have average 45% critrate, and they crit for 244% on most bosses (mortal strikes, slaying, meta).
And Cheeky spreadsheet says that 12agi meta beats 24ap meta by 30dps (6 vs 36) in my gear

Only downside is elevated aggro management. I have found myself using Readiness in first 30 seconds of fight for fast second FD. Burst can be quite big.

Lightning Breath is a pet cast, and can be added basically wherever you want as a seperate line, since it doesn't interfere with castsequence, castrandom, cast (normal spells) or use.

Using a (slightly modified) version of what Grogzor posted as an example:

/script UIErrorsFrame:Hide()
/cast [target=pettarget, exists] Kill Command
/cast [target=pettarget, exists] Lightning Breath
/castsequence reset=2/target/combat Auto Shot, Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/script UIErrorsFrame:Show()

My shot rotation is different when quick shots procs, is there a mod where it would make it easier for me to see when quick shots procs and makes a duration bar for it on my screen?

I believe this might be what you're looking for:
Kharthus's Hunter Timers | World of Warcraft @ Curse.com

Hey guys, there is something that has been bothering me which I hope you guys will be able to help me with. Namely, /stopcasting in a KC macro.

I specced BM so I could pump out great DPS despite my somewhat crappy latency (150-250ms). I like weaving my shots manually (ie. casting steady just before the auto timer runs out), but I have found that despite this, KC will often clip my autoshot. I have tried to create a macro that will cancel the steady cast (similar to mages' /stopcasting /cast Fireball macros) and cast KC.

I have discovered that /stopcasting will not actually interrupt SS unless auto shot is not cycling. ie.:

/stopcasting
/cast Kill Command

This does nothing at all. My character's animation will go into idle mode, but steady will still finish casting.

Hope you can help me out here.

Try to use your Kill Command before Steady Shot, not after. This way you eliminate the chance it can interfere with Auto Shot.

But then steady itself would delay auto because it would come a bit later.

The savings comes because the client doesn't wait for KC to finish to request steady shot(I think) It doesn't need server verification. So in theory you could hit the button twice instantaneously and get both off.

On the back end, the client won't cast KC until it's gotten confirmation that steadyshot finished (since it has a cast you can't interrupt), so you'll get an extra latency delay after steady completes before KC will fire, which pushes auto off.

If i can get a GoA totem.. I can get about 1030 agi (includes a warp burger and a major agi pot). I have 770 unbuffed post LR.

As for rotation, I've been using: Auto Steady Arcane; Auto Steady KC; Auto Steady Multi; Auto Steady KC.. and so on with good results.

I noticed that issue too. One of our hunters gave his scorpid the same name as his character, and his scorpid wasn't stacking poison on trash mobs if there was another scorpid in the raid.

I think its a really weird bug.

It isn't a bug, the poisons from the same rank do not stack. That is why when there are 2 scorpids in the raid, hunters use different ranks. I would recommend that one of you switch to rank 3. However, with the upcoming nerf I would think you would do better to just drop the scorpid all together and find a new pet.

Currently BM specced with T4 equivalent gear (Armory Link).

I entered in all my numbers into Cheeky's spreadsheet and started playing around with different rotations.

According to that thing, I would have a higher DPS without arcane or multishot in my rotations and that just seems really strange to me. They hit for higher than steady and just happen to have a higher mana cost.

It just seems like I'm missing something or using the Spreadsheet wrong. Any ideas?

Jaxxon did you give the target armor? At 0 armor steadyshot does more damage then arcane or multi at a pretty low AP level (depending on weapon equipped)

I completely missed that box. Thanks for the heads up.

hi,

it's my 1st post in this forum, and i have a question for my trinkets.
Im beast 41/20/0 and i have 3 trinkets for the moment (need leotheras'trinket!)

-dragonspine trophy
-Hourglass of the Unraveller
-bloodlust broch


whats the better dual for my hunter ? i know dragonspine is good but i dont know
whats the best beetween the blue and the violet trinket.

Thx for your opinions and sorry for my english.

the best advice is to download the spreadsheet by cheeky

well in my case Dragonspine and bloodlust gives highest on spreadsheet, the leo trinket is prolly better if your SUV, but im BM aswell, you can check my gear on the link, but you didn't specify a link and i couldn't find you on armory so i cant realy give you any real info.

hi there
like many ppl here this is my first post and the thread(and the pages linked to) already helped me very much, especially now using macros which boosted my dps since im always having ~200ms ping.

i really like that you people here explain everything and dont just say "its like that because i read it there - no further comments"

before i read this thread i made my own calculations and experimentally achieved some data/coefficients. i saw some formulas for calculating the steady shot or arcane shot but due to lack of infos couldnt use them(furthermore i didnt trust them very much because it seems that many different formulas for the same topic(shot) exist).

therefore i wanted to determine the things myself and just observed the dmg difference when changing equip and activating trinkets.
the data i received was(everyone who isnt interested in the numbers can skip the next passage):
autoshot(avgdmg per shot, 0enemyarmor):
739 --+52AP--> 750
737 --+64AP--> 750
750 --+200AP-> 791
447 --+52AP--> 458
447 --+64AP--> 460
458 --+200AP-> 499

what confuses me a little bit, is that both fully eqipped and naked the +52AP, +64AP and +200AP give +11, +13 respectively +41dmg/shot. i thought(i have read) autoshot has no linear coherence with ap.
but nevertheless is get 0,212, 0,203 respectively 0,205 what gives avg 0,207 dmg per point ap.

steadyshot(dmg/shot, 0enemyarmor):
711 --+52AP--> 727
727 --+200AP-> 787
296 --+52AP--> 311
311 --+200AP-> 371

quite consistent, gives 0,3 dmg/point ap

so i want to know whats good/whats bad on my calculus so far(the rest is just mathematical equivalence). i read that the steadyshot tooltip is wrong what of course destroys everything for the steadyshot. but i think its a very tough thing to say the tooltip is just wrong. any link where i can comprehend this would be great :>

with the formula also posted earlier this thread it just changes the dmg/ap coefficient to 0,2 if i think the right way.

if i use my coefficients i get the following formulas of which i also would like to know if they(or the thoughts behind them) are correct:
1:1 shotrotation => (dmg_auto + dmg_steady)/time_neededuntilrestart = dps
so if i raise the ap i get(windfury bow atm & bm spec => 2,1s): Δdps = (Δdmg_auto + Δdmg_steady)/2,1 = (ΔAP*0,207 + ΔAP*0,3)/2,1 = ΔAP*0,51/2,1

another formula i want to know if its right: Δdps = Δcritrate*1,3*dps_atm
with 40agi = 1% critchane and 22critrating = 1% critchance (whats very important for me as drdamage is for one or two weeks suddenly calculating as if 26critrating were 1% critchance(i update my aceaddons daily))

if the formulas are correct i get(calculating with 700dps):
8agi gem => Δdps = 3,76 dps
16ap gem => Δdps = 3,89 dps
8crit gem => Δdps = 3,33 dps
(but with survivalspec) 8agi gem => 9,2agi = 4,33dps

now you all say 8agi gem is the best, which means i have to have done a mistake. first candidate is i think the wrong or not steadyshot tooltip. but is anything else wrong? have i done anything right? =) calculating with 700dps is probably too high(since i read that good hunters do 1k dps including their scorpid) what lowers the efficiency of critgems, since their dpsgain is dependent on the actual dps.

using 0,2 instead of 0,3 for steadyshotap-coefficient i get:
16ap gem = 3,12dps
8agi gem = 3,38dps

and since the question was there about a little hitratingloss:
calculating with 700 dps, a loss of 8hitrating(0,42%) means 700*0,9958=697,06dps => loss of 2,94dps. and as i calculated above, every gem(+8agi, +8crit or +16ap) does more than 3dps => slight win for the dmg-gems.
but remember that other gems are going down as the dps do: from 89,58% to 90% some gems equal:
700*0,9=630dps, 630*0,8958=627,06dps => 8hit gives still 2,94dps, but the other gems(or just say crit) lose, because of the less dps: 8crit = 2,96dps. still more for the crit, but it demonstrates a little bit and surprisingly for myself it turns out to be a statement against hitrating

but i hope you (and i am sure you can) tell me if theres a mistake in it.


of course ill take a look at cheekys spreadsheet, but i just wanted to know how far my calculation is correct as im not the greatest fan of not understanding what in this spreadsheet happens and just getting out some results which i cant retrace.


so thats it for now, i thought i have some questions but i cant recall them atm :>


thanks in advance and sorry for some bad english or strange sentences partly built with a dictionary =)


€dit:
i just have one quick question: the thundering hellfirediamond is atm in the ah and im a jewelcrafter. so i am really interested if the gem is worth the cost/the gem restrictions.

You'll find that I include all steps in calculating values as clearly as I can. You should be able to reverse engineer the shot damage calculations very easily.

And please use capitalization in your posts.

I figured you'd be sick and tired of explaining this stuff, so I'll be just in for the spreadsheet. :>

Two questions still left. I'd be glad if someone could tell me how good the Thundering Skyfire Diamond is.
Another problem/issue for me is that since i use a macro i hear 2 annoying "ticking" sounds during the cast of the steadyshot. I figure it's the attempt to cast the new cycle, but this doesn't help me to abide these annoying sounds. Does anyone know any how to solve this problem? Maybe silencing some soundfiles or something like this?

Again thanks in advance.

Adding x RAP will, on Auto Shots pre-armor, crits, damage modifiers, etc, give you (x/14)*WeaponSpeed more damage per shot.

It's pretty easy to test for yourself.

First, check with your current bow (Sunfury), shoot for a while.
Observe that the damage isn't constant, even on the same mob. This proves there is a damage range for Steady Shot, which would not have been there if the tooltip was correct.

Next, equip a low level bow, e.g. bought from vendors. Keep your other gear the same.
Shoot the same mob you did in the previous test.
Observe that your damage is now much lower. This proves Weapon Damage is a factor in Steady Shot's actual damage range, again, not as the tooltip states.

Next, on a critter (these have very little armor mitigation, making them good test subjects), shoot for a while, note down average damage. I suggest not having pet active here (so you don't have Focused Fire buff active).
Change your RAP by a high amount, noting how much you remove/add.
Find more critters, repeat the shooting. Note the average damage.
Compare the two, and see how much damage was gained/lost from your RAP change. With adequate testing, you'll get a number very close to 0.2.
In beta, I spent hours doing this, with varying weapons. After taking armor mitigation into account, the following formula was the result:
SteadyShotDamage = DamagePercentageBonus*RWS*(150 + (WeaponDamage/WeaponSpeed)*2.8 + 0.2*RAP + [Dazed: 175])

This is the formula you can see on e.g. WoWWiki (of course, I'm not credited). This, I believe, is the first time someone reverse-engineered it. Almost every other site I've seen it on have it exactly the same way as I posted it the first time (I recently added a couple of parenthesis to avoid some confusion). Many others have later tested and the above formula matches every result I've ever seen.

Other than that, looking over the math pages on Cheeky's spreadsheet should prove beneficial to you.

I have a mod question for one of our core abilities: Feign Death

As you know if your a hunter when it get resisted you don't get a report in your combat log, the only place it shows up is those 3 lines of red error text in the middle of the screen.

My problem is that those lines are always spammed out with "can't do that yet" messages, so I almost always miss a FD resist. The feign death sound mod off of curse doesn't seem to work anymore, and ktm and omen cant properly tell when there is a resist.

Any have a way around this?

Hey, nice thread.

Q1: Hunter's Mark, should i wait for the 2 minutes to run out to reapply? Or should I reapply it before it runs out?

Q2: Why does a reapplication of Hunter's Mark only add ~20-30 seconds?

Many thanks.

1. Apply it before it runs out to keep the extra attack power.

2. It's a display bug that is being fixed in 2.2, you get the full 2 minutes.

ok I'm a total newb.....Where the heck is my combat log and how do I read the "clipping" of shots once I get there?

As well I'm hoping to get wws going for my guild...sadly I see no directions to install it...and I mean installation from a nublets perspective.

It seems like Omen keeps track of Feign Death resists. I can't confirm this from a programming standpoint, but everytime I get a resist I look over and still see my name high up on the aggro table. Also, if you are getting the error messages spammed, there are ways to remove those with macro scripts to help keep the UI a little bit cleaner.

Ultimately, nothing will completely fix the issue since Feign Death is still quite buggy.

Your right, sometimes when FD resists omen does catch it, but there are times when Ill FD and wont think it resists because the threat fell off omen, only to pull 15s later.

I think I had heard of a mod that outputs that red error text to chat or filters it or some such, anyone know this mod, or just what that error text is officially referred to as?

Omen properly registers a resist for me vs single mobs like bosses.

Hello-

Can someone explain to me exactly what they look at when reviewing Hunter DPS on a WWS log? I see the data and am able to navigate around and understand, generally, what happened during the fight, but I often see logs posted here followed by very detailed analysis. Advice often comes back like "such and such buff was allowed to lapse for a few minutes," "you had a bad run where you did not crit with steady shots for a few minutes," etc. The amount of information that WWS delivers is a bit overwhelming and I'm amazed at the amount of useful information people are able to cull from it; I would like to be able to do the same thing. Any help would be appreciated. Many thanks.

I look for the following:

- Ratio of Auto:Special
- Average shot damages
- Time spent DPSing
- Buffs used
- Damage taken
- Raw DPS number
- Total numbers of shots
- Pet DPS, specials used
- Pet survival

Based on spec I have a general feeling of what those numbers should be for most bosses, based on that Hunter's role. Some are fuzzy (total numbers of shots, damage taken) and some are hard-and-fast (Shot ratio, Buffs.) You'd be surprised what you can learn about someone over 4-5 different logs.

I'll evaluate a BM Hunter completely differently than a Survival. (And ask a Marksman to re-spec, it's not viable for our gear level.)

I was wondering what a good armor value would be to plug in for evaluating different shot rotations for SSC bosses. I plan to make an extended visit to Dr. Boom this weekend to try different methods of increasing my dps, but thus far a steady/auto rotation looks the best.
Thoughts and concerns include:
Given Dr. Booms relatively weak status, would steady/auto vs. a 1:1 rotation replacing some steadies with arcane be fair to work out a rotation for SSC? I'm wondering if their higher armor would make interspersing arcane worth it.
I tried spamming a castsequence going something like auto, steady, arcane, auto, steady, auto, steady, auto... but seemed to result in lower dps. Would doing auto/steady and manually hitting the arcane between firing the end of a steady and the start of the next auto be any different?
If I go with a simple steady/auto rotation, would macroing in the use of something like a Unity Charm adversely delay the rotation?

I find 30-40% fairly accurate for my personal uses, which is in the neighborhood of 5-8k armor.

Hey hunters,

I don't play a hunter, but my girlfriend does. She has a [Don Santos' Famous Hunting Rifle] and a [Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle] and is BM specced and is wondering which is better. It seems to me that if Don's proc is up 33% of the time it ends up being a 79dps weapon while Wolfslayer is 82dps once you factor in its added AP and has a higher damage range, so wolfslayer seems far better, am I missing anything?

Also, would it be worth her picking up a [Barrel-Blade Longrifle]? The raw dps is higher of course, but it is slightly faster.

I would suggest downloading Cheeky's spreadsheet and checking with her gear there.

How exactly would plugging her gear into an SS help figure out which weapon is best? Surely either don's proc is enough to make up for the lower raw dps or it isn't. Similary either Barrel-blade's faster speed is good in a BM hunter's rotation or it isn't.

Also, the intent of this thread is to help people, not just link to spreadsheets:
As for reading the thread, I saw Cheeky mention someone else was running rests on which weapon was best back on page 3 or 4, but there doesn't seem to have been any follow up since.

The proc affects more shots than the WeaponDPS does. Arcane Shot, for example, gains from the proc while being unaffected by WeaponDPS, so with Don Santos you should see higher average damage on this ability.
Whether the proc makes up for its lower DPS or not is dependent on the abilities you use, and what other gear you have (like haste procs, etc), latency, etc.
As far as I can remember, the weapon and its proc is modelled in the spreadsheet.

This is why I linked the spreadsheet, I should possibly have been a bit clearer in the original post.

I do believe, though, that if something can be solved without extreme amounts of work by using a spreadsheet, I will link to that spreadsheet.

As for the Barrel-Blade, again, it depends heavily on latency and reaction, which are variable between users. For example, this weapon would be too fast for me with the latency I currently have, but once I get stuff sorted and my latency drops, it will become much more viable.
It has potential to do a lot of damage if used in a perfect setting, but there are things to take into consideration which might severly impact it in a negative fashion.
Again, most of this is something that is included in the spreadsheet. When comparing the output from the spreadsheet to combat log parses, they match up very well, if you've input the correct settings.

I've been running tests myself, since I have both 2.7s guns. I have found in movement intensive fights (Void Reaver, Aran) the Wolfslayer is better, since you dilute the time of the Santos' Blessing effect. In stand still and DPS fights (Lurker, Prince, Magtheridon) The Don seems to be the superior weapon, but it's really very close. Both guns are just flat out amazing for BM 1:1 rotation. There is no wrong answer there.

And as Lactose said, the results you'll get are highly dependant upon your other gear, latency, shot rotation, buffs, etc. It's really difficult for any of the theorycrafters to say one is better than the other all the time, because it's just not true. If you get linked a spreadsheet, or get asked for a WWS log, realize we do it because there usually isn't a canned answer to your question.

I'm not a hunter, and I'm not overly familiar with their mechanics. I have read the shot rotation illustrated, so I understand the value of not clipping the autoshot. Beyond that, I'm sort of at a loss.

I can't help but think the hunters in my guild are underperforming, but I have no idea how to actually evaluate their performance. I have a feeling people are going to be watching their performance closesly, since one of them got a DST last night and their were probably some very dissapointed melee about it.

Here are the Gruul logs from the past 2 weeks:
Wow Web Stats
Wow Web Stats

Our hunters are getting very little group support as they are often in random groups. They pretty much never get totems, never get a shadow priest, and its iffy whether or not they get battle shout or any other support.

Any feedback as to what they are doing right, what they are doing wrong, or what the raid can do to support them better would be greatly appreciated. And if this isn't quite the right place to ask such general questions about specific individuals, I apologize.

Thankyou (and Cheeky), these two posts were exactly what I was after. However, should BM hunters even use Arc shot? My understanding was they pretty much only fired Auto and steady along with KC with instants only being used when having to move.

A Feign Death that is not resisted will always clear your threat on omen.
Unfortunately, you can have a feign death not be resisted and still not lose aggro.

This seems to happen when you try to do something immediately after a feign death.

To be safe, don't do anything for a global cooldown worth of time after fd.
This should make resists the only thing to worry about, and you can go back to fully trusting Omen.

Well, any DPS class is going to look bad if you give them no group synergy at all. Ask your Rogues to DPS in a healer group and see what kind of numbers they put up.

It seems like your Hunters (from the logs) know neither how to use a shot rotation nor manage a DPS pet in raids. Dynan in the first log has an extremely low DPS time (66%), I'd ask him what he was doing while the rest of you were trying to kill Gruul. He was better in the second log, but still low.

Your Hunters need to want to improve. And then they need to read some of the information here, at TKA Something - A World of Warcraft Hunter's Resource or another Hunter site. With their gearing they should both be able to scratch 800-900 DPS on Gruul. They should be some of your top DPSers. They need to spec for PvE, use a focus-dump DPS pet, and manage a real shot rotation. Other than that, they are fine.

I dont have time to do a full analysis, but just glancing at the WWS, Dynan needs to stop using serpent sting and aimed shot. He's a marksmanship hunter, but his rotation seems to be completely random. If he wants to go with marksmanship, he needs to pick up a 1:1.5 rotation. His pet didn't really do much, now that they don't take shatter damage, its fairly easy to keep it alive and attacking the entire fight.

Travisscisse is a marks/survival hybrid, and should also be using a 1:1.5 rotation. His pet damage was also really low, and his pet didn't use any abilities?

(e) Beaten! Looking through the logs, there were times when both hunters sat there and pretty much just used autoshot for several shots in a row also. Towards the beginning of the fight when mana wasn't an issue as well.

Can I get a clarification on what a 1:1.5 rotation is?

Also, what in your opinion is the ideal group set-up built around buffing 2 hunters dps?

And thanks for the quick feedback and the link to the TKA site.

In general, both Arcane Shot and Multi-Shot does more damage on average than Steady Shot. Thus, using them instead of a Steady Shot will almost always increase damage dealt. Note that this is much more taxing on mana.

For BM Hunters, a nice of way of visualizing your shots is something like...
You fire Auto Shots at a certain speed. Sometimes, like if you have hastes proc, this speed changes. However, it's never random, so you know when to expect it (especially with a shot timer).
You have specials, all of which can be used between 2 Auto Shots (excepting Aimed Shot, but that one isn't good in terms of DPS).
After an Auto Shot fires, the best thing to fire (disregarding mana issues) is the shot that deals the most damage on average.

Set up a priority queue, example:
If Arcane Shot is ready, fire that.
If Multi-Shot is ready, fire that.
If neither of the above is ready, fire Steady Shot.

Then use that to determine which special to use between each Auto Shot.

A 1:1.5 rotation means that you use Steady Shots between each pair of Auto Shots, and every other time you add in Multi/Scorpid/Arcane as well. So you get one and a half special shots (1 being Steady) for each Auto Shot.

Leader of the Pack is probably the best single group buff for a Hunter. It helps heal the pet and 5% crit for both pet and Hunter is really nice. If they have serious mana problems (and a well-played MM Hunter will) than a Shadow Priest is even better.

If you have extra Shaman after the Melee and Caster/Healer groups, one with GoA for the Druids, Hunters and pets (and the Shaman his/herself) is nice, but most guild don't have that luxury.

Pets and Hunters should be blessed by Paladins. Might is incredibly useful on pets, as is Kings (and Salvation for BM Hunters pets in fights like Void Reaver helps too.)

Basically 3 specials per 2 autoshots. The general template for a 1:1.5 rotation ends up being something like: auto, steady, multi, auto, steady, auto, steady, arcane, auto, steady.

I rarely get my ideal group, but if I were to pick one, it would probably be hunter, hunter, feral druid, shadow priest, shaman. Since neither of the hunters are beastmastery they really arent offering much to the group, TSA for the druid and shaman (if enhancement) I suppose. They do receive mana, LotP, and GoA with a setup like that though.

Finally was able to get a copy of Excel and checked out Cheeky's Spreadsheet.
After Testing some stuff out I collected the following Data

Assumptions -

Spec 41/20/0 (Same as Mine)
All Attack Powers and Critical %'s are prior to raid buffs (except AotH) but all DPS's given include Improved BoM, BoK, Improved GotW, Ravager Dog, Flask of Relentless Assault.
Pet is considered buffed with Improved BoM, BoK and Improved GotW.
100% To Hit
Standard 1:1 Shot Rotation
Raptor Pet with Highest Ranks Bite and Growl along with Cobra Reflexes.


1550/15 = 1609.62
1500/15.5 = 1601.29
1525/15.25 = 1599.43

50 AP > .5 Crit
@ 1500 AP => 1 Crit = 50 AP
>50 AP = ΔDPS of 15.94
>.5 Crit = ΔDPS of 7.61

1600/15 = 1625.56
1650/15 = 1641.5
1600/15.5 = 1633.33
1625/15.25 = 1637.80

50 AP > .5 Crit
@ 1600 AP => 1 Crit = 50 AP
>50 AP = ΔDPS of 15.94
>.5 Crit = ΔDPS of 7.77

1700/15 = 1657.44
1750/15 = 1673.39
1700/15.5 = 1665.37
1725/15.25 = 1669.04

50 AP > 1 Crit
@ 1700 AP => 1 Crit = 50 AP
>50 AP = ΔDPS of 15.94
>.5 Crit = ΔDPS of 7.93

1550/20 = 1684.35
1500/20.5 = 1674.79
1525/20.25 = 1679.27

50 AP > .5 Crit
@ 1500 AP => 1 Crit = 56 AP
>50 AP = ΔDPS of 16.71
>.5 Crit = ΔDPS of 7.15

1600/20 = 1701.07
1650/20 = 1717.79
1600/20.5 = 1708.38
1625/20.25 = 1713.44

50 AP > .5 Crit
@ 1600 AP => 1 Crit = 56 AP
>50 AP = ΔDPS of 16.71
>.5 Crit = ΔDPS of 7.31

1700/20 = 1734.51
1750/20 = 1751.23
1700/20.5 = 1741.97
1725/20.25 = 1746.96

50 AP > 1 Crit
@ 1700 AP = > 1 Crit = 56 AP
>50 AP = ΔDPS of 16.71
>.5 Crit = ΔDPS of 7.43



@ 1500 AP and 20% Crit an increase of CR and AP per Table below net equal amounts of DPS gain.

1 CR/48 AP
2 CR/46 AP
3 CR/44 AP
4 CR/42 AP
5 CR/40 AP
6 CR/38 AP
7 CR/26 AP
8 CR/34 AP
9 CR/32 AP
10 CR/30 AP
11 CR/28 AP
12 CR/26 AP
13 CR/24 AP
14 CR/22 AP
15 CR/20 AP
16 CR/18 AP
17 CR/16 AP
18 CR/14 AP
19 CR/12 AP
20 CR/10 AP

Some Conclusions -

Gainging 50 AP will increase your DPS by the same amount regardless of your current AP assuming Crit% stays the same.
The more AP you have, the more an increase of .5 Crit% will benefit you.
As you gain more Crit%, subsequent increases in Crit% will not benefit you as much.
As you gain more AP, Crit% becomes worth more.

Pretty standard stuff that we already know.

So for my question -

Is it possible to create a graph that follows the optimum AP/ Crit Ratio? Such as a line where if you are above it you should start stacking crit% and if you are below it is more beneficial to stack AP?

Well it happened and I was able to pickup a Dragonspine Trophy. Let me say I am BM spec. and really do enjoy it from both mana efficiency and damage. I won the Dragonspine and then we moved on to Mag for the farm content night (lots of regular raiders were afk making it kinda painful). Back on subject it is one of spec. and post analysis of damage output. I am very happy with doing 1379 dps on Mag (so far I haven't come across other WWS parses of Mag. with a higher hunter output).

Fola - WWS

From the parse you can see I did:

169 autoshots
141 steady shots
8 multi
10 arcane

I guess this confuses me somewhat as I expected with 5/5 imp hawk and Dragonspine I would see less autos than specials (clipping). I am a double macro spammer btw (one with KC one without).

Questions:
Anyone think of a reason why I saw the inverse of auto clipping?

Would you drop rapid killing from the talent build at this point as rapid fire just isn't usable (tbh I have never really used it as BM with a 2.9 spd weapon)?

2/5 in Imp Hawk or 3/5 Imp Hawk (yes 3/5 shows higher damage in the spreadsheet but is it realistically executed damage)? [my thoughts currently are 2/5 now and 3/5 when the haste nerf goes through]
- This decision really boils down to the Union of events having both DS and IH up at the same time, my Imp Hawk uptime is about 29% for that fight with Dragonspine Uptime of about 26%.

Any other suggestions on talent build changes (planning to go with 2/5 Imp Hawk, 2/5 Imp Mark, and 0/2 Rapid killing atm)?

I would like to hit 1450-1500 on Mag. before the Scorpid nerf comes out (not too shabby for 1 pc of T5 level gear – lawl Boots of Effortless Striking, I don't get much access to the T5 loot as I appear to normally be raid healing on my shaman).

I am not sure if it has been discussed before or not but what does everyone think about ring enchants ? +2 weapon damage or +4 all stats ?

Formula: Enchant Ring - Stats - Items - World of Warcraft

Formula: Enchant Ring - Weapon Might - Items - World of Warcraft

For my current gear +4 stats would pick me up around 1 more dps fully buffed but would also benefit by providing 90 more hp (w/kings) and 135 more mana (w/kings) over striking. I personally do not have the rep for the +4 stats to rings just striking for me.

Yes, but that line is for a specific shot rotation and talent spec. I suppose it is possible to solve for this ratio knowing all the information in the spreadsheet, but I shudder to think of what that logic would look like.

If someone else things they can solve this problem (and realize with DST and IAotH you have 200 shots worth of data to factor in) contact me and maybe we can work something out.

It would pretty much take a dedicated graphing program designed to take as inputs all the relevant data which the spreadsheet takes (including shot rotations etc.) and kicks out the graph. One could even create a 3-d curve of the various crit/ap combos on the x and y axis with dps on the z axis given a specific weapon/ammo/hit rating/talent build. Theoretically one could then calculate the maximum "path" along the curve that results in the largest dps increases for each increment.

I've thought about doing it, but honestly, it's not worth the effort when you consider actual in-game itemization options. AP/Crit worth are really only of importance when considering equal-itemization choices (gem selection being the most common of these choices). If one item is higher itemization level it will (almost always) be better (depending on spec). There are _very_ few item choices where it isn't obvious if the item is an upgrade (except perhaps in weapons, but you aren't comparing ap/crit stats on weapons most of the time).

This simplified spreadsheet can be used to calculate the damage difference made by incremental increases of ap, crit, and agi. It's fairly trivial to deduce which stat benefits you more at a given time once you get your info in (hint: agi will almost always be better if you have BoK). In general though, if you are trying to decide between two items simply plop em in the spreadsheet and see how it changes things (or get the marginal upgrade and find out later if no one else is jonesin for the item).

I'm a BM spec hunter, check out my armory link in my name if you want to see my gear/build.

Dr. Boom

and here's one from a lurker below kill a few weeks ago

Lurker Below

I'm naturally interested in maximizing dps. I generally run fairly high on the charts in raids, but I'm thinking, with my gear I should at least be hit 1300-1400 dps. I've done a lot of different testing with Cheeky's Spreadsheet and I think I have about the best of everything that currently available to me right now. I'm not sure if you can really learn anything from the the Dr. Boom, but I did make one big change, I started using Autohotkey for my steady/auto macro so you might notice a change from the number of auto/steady shots I actually get off, yeah, I know boss fights are different and a bit more hectic, but it's what I have to work with. Unfortunately I don't have a new wws log with me actually using the autohotkey program but I did notice a bit of an increase in my dps. Anyway, just looking at the base dps from Dr. Boom, I'm wondering if I can really learn anything from it as far as shot rotation

my current macro is:
I'm just not sure what else I can do to increase dps. One thing that gets me is my guild pally's being unwilling to buff pets. How much of a dps increase would Kings and Might be toward a Cat? Is that what I'm missing? How big of a role does latency and fps play on dps? I usually run at about 19 fps during boss fights and about a 230 ping? Could that be the problem? I always strive to be the best I can, but I seem to always fall short of my goal. What can I do to be better?

Not sure if you'll need anymore info.

Currently, it's a bit of an issue to buff pets because of each race needing to be buffed individually; meaning that if the Paladin casts Kings on to your pet cat, the other hunter with the Ravager would not receive any buffs and he'd have to do it again. Wait for 2.2 then when he buffs Kings/Might on your pet, all other hunter pets will receive it. Overall, I just wish they'd change it to be like normal group buffs. That covered:

The only thing I can imagine you doing is massive clipping on shots. I run about the same latency and average about 1k DPS in lesser gear. In no way am I trying to take a shot at you so I apologize if you see it that way. I've personally noticed that macros are terrible, at least in my case. I've tried multiple ones including the one above and most recently:

and
Note that the second macro is not a spamming macro and requires that you time it all by hand.
WoW Forums -> Fixing Littletrouble to work with KC macro
That is a link to a thread on how to edit LittleTrouble to show the full cast time because with the second macro above, it will actually end it and you'll just have to base it on other senses like site and sound. Anyway, as I was saying, the only thing I can imagine is that you are in some way clipping auto shots or not utilizing your other abilities (Multi-Shot). Then there is the fact that Lurker is both threatless for ranged and the idle time between submerge and the adds showing up can "lessen" DPS a bit. If you could, Morogrim would be an excellent encounter to determine maximum DPS. At this moment, I also see you having Blessing of Salvation as the only Paladin blessing and there is no reason that you should have that. Talk with your paladins and let them know that you should be getting Might, Kings, and Wisdom and if there is a forth Paladin then Salvation is acceptable. Other things I've seen is that you have 1/2 in Animal Handler and that is a DPS increase with your pet gaining that extra hit. Drop Spirit Bond and max that one and get Improved Mend Pet too. I'd also suggest 4/5 Frenzy since a cat with Cobra Reflexes should have enough haste to keep up Frenzy plus Ferocious Inspiration at a quick rate. Over the duration of the fight (13 minutes) your pet healed only 16000 from Spirit Bond which is sort of weak. Especially with you having 3 pieces of T5 you have zero need for SB.
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft is my suggestion.

A thread I made earlier this week has a lot of WWS's for you to look at for people varying in range of progression from first time Gruul's up to people farming Illidan.

WoW Forums -> Post your WWS

My overall suggestion is to get LittleTrouble and Quartz or eCasting Bar and configure them to try and manually time your shots to a much tighter and better rotation with just using only Auto shot and Steady shot. As you feel more comfortable with the timing and not clipping any shots, learn to weave in Multi and Arcanes in place of Steady Shots and continue until you're out of mana.

Yeah, I know that both of those wws examples probably weren't the best for showing my dps, generally I'm usually number 1 for dps on pretty almost all fights where I get to do straight dps, 775 dps is extremely low for me and usually run in the 1k to 1.1k dps. That was a pre vashj luker kill so I was 3/5 t5 there. As far as the clipping goes, on that lurker fight I had 176 auto shot hits, 156 steady hits, 16 arcane shots, and 2 multi, for a total of 176 auto shots/174 special shots, I guess I'm not sure how clipping comes into effect there? Also, as far as using special shots, I was under the impression that using multi and arcane shots were just really a waste of mana for a BM hunter because it's not possible to weave 2 specials between auto shots. Am I mistaken? What I really don't understand is how hunters can get into the 1400-1500 dps ranges with not nearly as good gear, or is that where fps and latency come into effect and it's not even possible to get with having a moderately high ping and fairly crappy computer?

I've looked at quite a few wws threads and it seems like the hunters are doing a lot more damage with a lot fewer shots. I'm guessing a lot of that is having no pally buffs in that lurker kill I posted. I will definitely make those changes to my build, I never thought about imp mend pet over spirit bond, thanks for that info. I'll keep track of next upcoming raid and post my wws from it.

Clobbering is when you completely overwrite the next Autoshot with a steady shot. Clipping is when you delay the time by starting your Steady Shot too late. That is what happenes to me when I use macros.

Yes and no. Multi and arcane will generally do more damage per shot than steady, however it's the mana as you said. You're not trying to do a 1.5-1 rotation, you're just swapping that Steady Shot to an Arcane or Multi still doing that 1-1 rotation.

Improved Mend Pet is nice because of the debuff removal at 50% and the reduction in mana cost if you're just not lucky enough to steal a few Chain Heals.

FPS, lag, all that can make a difference but it's how you personally deal with it that can make a difference though sometimes it's just totally unavoidable.

I'm lost again

We tried to move a bit forward and last night we get pwnd by Void Reaver, well if you consider it was our first try ever beating him down to 30% is not so bad but still.

My biggest problem with this fight is that I use a lot of mana to keep pet up, I have to mend him every of this mele AoE things, If I forget this once he live (/cheer avoidance) twice, he may live, 3rd time = dead pet and even more mana lost for rezing.
On Gruul I can keep 900dps, our first night on VR i had troubles with 700, and dmg done by my pet took less part in my overall dmg and dps.
I was shooting less (running from orbs) and for less because only buff I got was TSA from another hunter (no druid, no shamman, just me + hunter + 2 paladins + mage) on Gruul my avg autoshot/steadyshot hits for 660/650 on VR it was 580/570 so this may be the cause, but are there any other tricks for VR fight?

Thanks in advance

Train your pet with full Arcane resistance and you'll be just fine.

I'm plain stupid, I thought this pounding is physical dmg and now I've checked is arcane.

With the upcoming nerf to Scorpid Poison, can anyone suggest a pet to tame? I've read that Ravager is the best, but how would Wind Serpents and Cats stack up? And if I (or another hunter in my guild) uses a Wind Serpent, what is the best way to maximize their dps?

Cats stack up evenly with Ravagers from what I can tell. I need to re-tame and level another Wind Serpent and try it out now that I'm not doing 5 mans anymore and their pathing becomes less of an issue when bosses can't stunned or rooted.

For a BM Hunter, a Ravager is going to be about 10 DPS more, pre-mitigation, than a Cat. This assumes you can generate enough focus to spam Gore/Claw. So that would be the upper limit.

Really it's not a big deal either way. Natural variance in crit rates from encounter to encounter would hide this minor superiority.

The one knock I have heard against Ravagers is their survivability. This is something I haven't really tested since I don't have a 70 Ravager at the moment, but I was wondering if it was a stamina or armor issue that could be fixed with smart training points, or if it was enough of an issue to make Cats preferable (given rather intense raid encounters).

The one thing I have noticed is that encounters don't have much gray area in regard to pet survivability. It essentially comes down to the pet will die or won't die, with little room in between. For example, Archimonde's Doomfire is probably going to kill your pet no matter what type and spec is it. So, I am not sure survivability is as important as I once thought it was, but I wouldn't mind hearing other's insights...especially if you have been running with a Ravager (I typically run with a Cat or Scorpid....and I usually prefer the Cat for most raids).

I have been told that +hit gems only contribute to melee (as opposed to ranged) hit. Is this the case?

For hunters starting MH & BT, how much hit do you run with?

For a while, one of the gems was bugged and did not affect ranged Chance to Hit. This, as far as I know, has been fixed.

Testing indicates 9% +Hit being needed to not miss.

+hit gems all work for ranged currently. When TBC first came out the uncommon quality glinting gem's +3 hit rating was only showing for melee while the glinting noble topaz showed and worked for both. This was fixed and now the glinting flame gem works for both.

Just a quick question about hunters mark, does the stacking AP bonus get reset if the mark is refreshed?

Just basically a timing thing, ideally you would refresh at 1sec left regardless so no shots are without at least the 110ap bonus but just if it is important to make sure it's refreshed before expires to keep it at 440ap.

If hunter X marks a target and shoots at it, the stack increases. If he re-casts mark, the stack remains. If your mark drops off due to timed out, and is then recast, the stack needs to be rebuilt.

If hunter X (not imp HM) marks and builds a stack, then hunter Y (not imp HM) casts mark on the same target, I dont know what happens. I assume it keeps the stack.

If hunter Z (with imp HM) marks a target, other hunters cant refresh it anyway so all is good. If that hunter dies, throw another mark up asap as the stack is lost.

Hi, first post here, long time reader of these great hunter threads.

I have a new lvl 70 hunter - meaning in greens/blues. Terrible hit rating of 47. Trying to gear up with craftables to speed up viability for KZ.

Bought some Felfury Gauntlets, trying to decide which gems to put in their red and blue sockets. The socket bonus is +3 hit, which makes it interesting as I need that stat so much.

Key choices as I see it (your answers will teach me how to approach similar choices in future):

Option 1:
2 x Delicate Living Ruby = 16agi and forgo the socket bonus
(look for other +hit gear instead)

Option 2:
1 x Delicate Living Ruby = 8agi and
1 x Shifting Nightseye = 4 agi, 6 sta
(which gives the socket bonus of +3 hit)

Option 3:
1 x Glinting Noble Topaz = 4 hit, 4 agi and
1 x Shifting Nightseye = 4 agi, 6 sta
(which gives the socket bonus of +3 hit)

Option 4:
2 x Rigid Dawnstone = 16 hit
(but no socket bonus)

Which would you choose, and why?

Please don't just ask me to complete the spreadsheet - it looks complex and I'm really just after fairly generic advice when faced with very low +hit. Is it pretty much 'forgo every other stat until you get to the +hit cap'? or 'balance things out until you reach the +hit cap' or something else?

Many thanks, these threads are such a great learning resource.

I would go with option 3 since its dirt cheap. With the stam gem, you can keep these gloves for a long time as a stam glove option.

Whenever I socket something, I do this:

now by going on your options, I see...



Which makes things easier to compare. I pick option 3. You need hit, and that does it without loosing too many other stats in the process. Also, stam is important in pve.

btw I didnt include kings or talents into the total. I always include kings, which would make option 2 and 3 even better. I am BM so I dont include +AP%.

Also it really helps to know your current AP and crit% when making socket choices, but typically Agi > all, unless you need hit.

edit: how do I get that to format properly?

Profile should link from the side, but stats are pretty low:
AP ~1450 unbuffed
Crit 14%
Nub BM hunter, loving the spec.

Looks like option 3 is the winner, your comments are very instructive thanks Lumi and Intermission.

Lumi the four options probably cost a similar amount don't they? It seems most rare gems sell for about 50-60g each. Unless I'm missing something.

I'd take option 3 as well...

Not least because if you are in quest blues you are likely to be short of Stamina for Kara as well, and there are a number of fights in there where you will take some damage.

For example on a fight like the Shade of Aran it will be much easier for you (and your healers) if you are somewhere near 10k health.

If you are short of to hit i always recommended our newer hunters to farm for the Sonic Spear, however if that's not dropping for you consider getting Hellscream's Will - the Maghari Exhalted axe (not an option for allies because the equivalent item is a mace) the nice thing about that item however is that it is grindable solo.

The axe has 42 +hit on it, which would do nice things for your current rating.

It's also worth noting that the Ebon Netherscale set is good at this point as well, and it is crafted so it doesn't rely on drops.

Short comment/question to the pet issue:
I was wondering whether scorpids will still be good pets and not just that overwhelming strong anymore?
Everyone wants to dump his scorpid but can't it be that with 2.2 there it comes out that they still do fairly good dps?

The scorpid will still have claw, which gives it a decent focus dump, but it's a defensive pet not a damage pet. Meaning it gets -6% to damage, but +10% to armor. Ravagers, in comparison, get +10% damage and +5% armor, but -7% health. Cats and raptors also get +10% and all three have a focus dump (either claw or gore) making them the prime damage pets.

(Stat %s gotten from petopia.brashendeavors.net. Great pet resource.)

I didn't know that they just delete scorpid poison instead of nerfing it. Ok, then it's clear that every hunter dumps his scorpid. Thanks.

I don't think he meant that scorpid poison is deleted (in fact it is not). He was simply saying that scorpids will still have claw along with the nerfed poison.

As far as whether or not it will be a viable pet.. I'm sure it will still be decent and with good gear it can pull maybe 300-400 dps but other pets can already do that. I don't think there is a reason to use scorpid at all other than pvp/arena. Get a lvl 70 ravager, cat, or wind serpent and you won't lose much or any dps at all from your pet (depending on how bad you abused the poison).

Oops.

I apologize if I was unlcear. No, they are not completely dumping scorpid poison. It will still have that in addition to claw. Most of the time its a question of either/or on what to spend your focus on. Scorpid poison is a Dot so you could claw in between ticks I suppose, but it would be hard to keep a full stack up while claw is on autocast, and you'd have to determine if the new poison is comparable damage per focus to claw. Since claw has no cooldown, if it's the better DpF option then theres no reason to even use scorpid poison.

Blizzard made the different "classes" of pets for a reason. They wanted some to be better at tanking and some better at damage. They do not want a low damage tanking pet to out dps a pet that's designed for higher dps but crappy tanking stats. That should have been clear to the people that were hoping that the outrageous damage scorpids could do was intended.

(Edited for clarity.)